


Spectrophobia

by aeraecura



Series: Triage [3]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Adventure, Angst, Character death (which may or may not be permanent), F/F, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Undertale Neutral Route - Near Genocide Ending, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, Undyne has a SAVE file, Violence, and nothing could possibly go wrong, references to canonical suicidal thoughts/actions, the mildest of body horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24499279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeraecura/pseuds/aeraecura
Summary: After seven years of rule by Queen Alphys and an undead knight, two human children fall into the Underground. They have no idea that they’re playing an unwinnable game.(This is the third story in a series. Starting at the actual beginning is, uh, advisable, but you don’t need to have read the previous entries to follow what’s going on.)
Relationships: Alphys/Undyne (Undertale)
Series: Triage [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1114971
Comments: 21
Kudos: 19





	1. Can You Really Call This an Adventure, We Didn't Get Adopted by a Nice Old Monster Lady or Anything

_"No, please, I won't do it ever again, you win, I w-won't get in your way anymore! I can help you, I can be helpful, I can... I can... ...please don't kill me..!"_

_The room faded in and out. Chara stood over Flowey, bloodied by thorns and bullets and fiery magic and everything else he had thrown at them, six rebellious human SOULs revolving in the dark like colorful planets. No hint of kindness or mercy shone through their glassy eyes._

_They lowered their knife._

_"As...ri...el..."_

* * *

Flowey thought about leaving the RUINS, sometimes, just to see what would happen if he called Alphys' bluff. They were so small once you got used to them.

When he could no longer pretend that Chara was going to come to save him, when he realized that he had no way of knowing if they were dead (their SAVE file was overwritten, he refused to believe that Undyne's Determination could be greater than theirs, and their past behavior didn't exactly inspire optimism) and that even if they were alive, he had betrayed them, attacked them, given them no reason to trust him or want him nearby, when he imagined them living a long and happy life on the surface without him, having forgotten that he even existed—he considered a different method of "leaving".

It seemed like the final logical step, letting Alphys self-destruct in peace, free of his pointless existence. But he could never bring himself to do it. He didn't know why not. The petals Undyne had crushed were only just beginning to heal when he came down with an infection—some weird Amalgamate germs, maybe, or a parasite in the soil that Asgore could have identified—that he just couldn't shake off, which left his roots rotting into soggy mush and seemed like a clear message from the universe that it was time to quit.

Call it spite, then. Flowey never liked being told what to do. He excised the dying roots as best he could, then planted himself in the sunlight and slept. His petals stayed wilted, refusing to mend, and new roots didn't grow in to replace the old. He never healed quite right. But he didn't die.

The RUINS were so small.

Flowey had too much pride to seek out _Napstablook_ for companionship, and if he did happen to approach the ghost, just or the hell of it, they would vanish before he could get two words out. Alphys installed more surveillance cameras to replace the ones Flowey had destroyed, which gave him a perfect outlet for his frustration, but she gave up replacing them even sooner than he'd expected. He savored his petty victory for half a day before the silence in the RUINS left him numb and empty. Even emptier than normal.

Out of habit, the way a dog might dig up a bone and gnaw it and bury it again, he wondered why Chara left. Sometimes. Not so often as he used to. Whatever their motivations were, the end result was the same.

They were never coming back.

* * *

A familiar sight. The same beginning to the same story, cycling back around: a human child, scratched and bruised by their fall into the RUINS.

Less familiar was the sight of two human children.

One was busy pawing around through a backpack, so it was the other human that saw Flowey first. They grabbed for the other human and pointed, gasping a name, but before he could commit that bit of information to memory, the second human was pointing a long-barreled gun and pointed it at his face.

Flowey saw his own eyes reflected in the metal. He stared back at himself, phantom pains tingling through limbs he didn't possess anymore. He'd seen weapons like this one before. Once.

The first human shoved the gun down, pointing it into the dirt. Flowey ducked underground and came back up against the wall, as far away as he could get.

"What's your problem?" the second human demanded, smacking their companion's hand away.

"What's YOUR problem?! You can't attack a flower, that's so STUPID."

"It has a _face_. Normal flowers don't have _faces_."

"So? If we found a unicorn, would you try and kill that, too? Look, you scared it." Flowey flinched back as the human crouched over him, and instantly hated himself for it. "Awww, he's cute!" they squealed in delight, switching over to a hideous baby voice. "Hi, cuuuuutie! Don't be scared, it's only a widdle BB gun."

"Don't _tell_ it that," the second human groused. "And don't get so close to that thing."

"If you kill him, I'll kill YOU. He's cute."

"It's creepy."

The first human frowned and sat back on their heels, allowing Flowey a chance for a proper look at them. They were familiar enough to catch his attention, but their skin was a little too dark, their reddish hair was the wrong shade, and their mannerisms were _wildly_ wrong. The second human had an oversized army jacket that did far less to camouflage them than their hair, pale blond and long enough to sweep over the tops of their flowers. Even without the hair, Flowey already knew they couldn't be Chara, because Chara would never tolerate another human's presence. Unless they were bringing one in the form of a SOUL. A nice little apology gift for Flowey, like an absentee parent trying to buy back their kid's love with a shiny new toy.

"You think it'll bite my face off? You're not gonna do that, little flower, right?" asked the first human. Blessedly, they'd dropped the baby talk. "Can you talk? Do you have a name? Why are your petals all messed up? You're a golden flower, like those other ones, aren't you? Those are REAL golden flowers, aren't they?"

Embarrassingly, Flowey could only stare at them, his mouth hanging open a little. Once, he would've seen these noisy humans as gifts, two powerful SOULs falling straight through the barrier and onto his (figurative) lap, but that was when he had a SAVE file, when he was strong. Now... he was just as pitiful as his faded, wilting petals must have made him look. Alphys didn’t even need her mutant bodyguard to keep him away. In a fight against two humans, one of which carried a deadly weapon, he had no chance whatsoever.

No chance... in a _fight_.

Humans needed to sleep, just as much as monsters.

Flowey made a show of drooping. He hadn't spoken to another person in a long, long time, but all his runs through the Underground had given him plenty of experience in steering conversation down more _helpful_ paths, it was practically muscle memory. "Oh, gosh, I hope we haven't already gotten off on the wrong foot. I didn't mean to startle you, but it's just been so long since ANY humans have fallen down here," he said, perking up. "What are your names? I'm Flowey the flower, and I'm just SO happy to meet you!"

"Aww! We're—"

"Stop _telling_ it things!"

"Ugh, you're being crappy."

Flowey waited for the blond human to fire back, until he figured that the disgruntled silence _was_ their answer. "You two must be so confused. It's easy to forget... this place is called the Underground. It's inhabited by monsters—"

"See, I _told_ you. Get away from it!"

"No, silly, I already told YOU. I'm a FLOWER," Flowey corrected.

"Flowers don't have faces, and they don't talk."

Flowey smiled patiently. "Maybe not on the surface, but this is the Underground!"

"That's stupid."

"Let him finish!"

"How do you know it's a 'him'?"

"You said 'he', too!"

"Did not."

"YEAH!"

Good grief. Would Flowey have to hear this constant chatter once he'd absorbed their SOULs? He couldn't afford to be picky, but it was a nightmarish thought. "As I was saying... you may not realize this, but you're incredibly lucky to be HERE. The last time there was a human..."

Flowey's forced smile dropped away as realization set in, so incredibly obvious that he couldn't believe how stupid he'd been. He'd spent so much time worrying and wondering about Chara's fate, and _right here_ were two beings from their world. Chara always found humans detestable, but the others in their village knew they _existed_ , all those years ago, hadn't they?

"Saaay." He leaned in closer on his stem. "Have either of you seen my friend, Chara?"

Blondie and Rain Boots looked blankly at each other.

"'Chara'..?"

"Nope, never heard of them. What do they look like?"

"They..." Flowey lapsed into silence, his smile fading. What color was Chara's sweater? What color were their eyes? The face he remembered from their childhood was all scrambled together with the face they had stolen from someone else, an unlucky human with a stick and a bandaged knee. They looked like a human. "They... have brown hair, and light brown skin. They might still have some scars. They like striped sweaters, and they have a heart-shaped gold locket."

"Brown hair, light brown skin..." the first human glanced to their friend, scratching the back of their neck. "That's half the kids in our class, pretty much. Don’t you remember anything specific?"

"Fine, forget THAT part," Flowey said, a little desperate. "Their name is Chara Dreemurr, and they're a kid like you, and they DESPISE humans. If you met them, you would KNOW. You just WOULD."

"Um. Then I guess we haven't. I definitely haven't."

"You're friends with a misanthrope?"

"They hate humans, not flowers," Flowey explained, which didn't stop the second human from eyeing him suspiciously. He cleared his... well, he made a throat-clearing sound. "ANYWAY, what I mean is... I like humans. I'd like to help you, if... it's all right with you both."

"Don't worry, little guy, we aren't gonna do anything bad to you. They were just SURPRISED, is all." The first human shot their friend a look.

Flowey beamed. "Of course! Gosh, you're both really smart to be so cautious. This place, the Underground, it's... well, why don't you follow me? I'll explain everything while I guide you through the catacombs."

* * *

Chara had already solved all the puzzles necessary for progression, and Alphys, in her infinite queenly wisdom, never bothered to recalibrate them, so the journey through the RUINS was nothing more than a long walk. The humans strolled along in no special hurry, Flowey following at their heels. The first human was wearing yellow rain boots, bright as crayons, but the soles turned steadily grayer as they tromped obliviously through the remnants of dust scattered all over the ground.

"This place, the RUINS, is completely abandoned. That's a good thing for us, because the rest of the Underground is inhabited by deadly monsters with magic powers, and they all hunger for human SOULs. If a monster were to absorb just one SOUL, it would gain terrible power, and two... brrr!" Flowey gave a theatrical shudder for emphasis.

"Two, as in... us," said Blondie.

"Yes, exactly. There's no guessing what their queen, Alphys, would do if SHE got her claws on more SOULs. Nothing good, I imagine. She despises any creature that isn't one of her own kind... she banished me here and vowed to have me killed if I ever attempted to escape. it could be worse... exile is better than being abducted and turned into one of her 'experiments'."

"Like a science experiment?" asked Rain Boots.

"Yes, exactly. When she was just the royal scientist, Alphys extracted a substance from human SOULs and injected it into the bodies of comatose monsters, mutating them into deathless abominations. After Chara rescued the SOULs and escaped to the surface, Alphys usurped the throne and used her remaining power to resurrect her best friend, a monster named Undyne. But it went hideously wrong. You see, when a monster returns from the dead, their SOUL doesn't come back with them. Without their SOUL, they can feel no love or compassion."

Rain Boots frowned, kicking at a few stray leaves.

"Undyne was never a NICE person, even as far as monsters are concerned, but now she's become a walking nightmare. She murdered the queen's other friend, then tried to kill ME, just for the sadistic joy of it. She would happily kill again if the queen didn't keep her on such a tight leash, which, well... there's no predicting how long THAT will last. Undyne hates human even more than Alphys does, if you can believe it."

"Her friend... that's sorta sad, actually," said Rain Boots.

"It's WHAT?"

"Not even the worst person can be COMPLETELY bad a hundred percent of the time, even if they try. Alphys did something good, for once, to help her friend... I'd maybe do the same thing, if I was her... but she messed it up. Even if they're both rotten people, that's depressing."

"Trust me. You would NOT think that way if you met them."

"I don't feel any pity for evil monsters that steal people's SOULs, even for a 'good' reason. _I_ wouldn't want to you bring _me_ back in that way, if I died. We would both go to hell," Blondie intoned.

"They're the bad guys. I know. I'm just SAYING."

"Well, don't do that."

"Don't do what, the stuff Alphys did? Darn, I was SO looking forward to turning you into an evil zombie. Not."

"You know what I meant."

"Yeah, so do you!"

"I haven't even gotten to the worst part, yet," Flowey said. "Not only is she violent AND invulnerable to attack, like most of the queen's creations, but Undyne has the power to alter time itself. Even if you COULD defeat her, she would simply undo her own death."

With wide-eyed innocence, Flowey allowed that cheery thought to linger in the air. For a long moment, both humans had nothing to say.

Finally, Blondie nodded, keeping up something close to a poker face. "We'll keep that in mind after we leave," they said.

"After you—huh? I JUST told you all those horrible things, and you STILL want to leave? You'll die!"

"We can't stay in this one place forever. Eventually, we'll have to move on."

"...I understand."

Knowing what he did about humans, their reaction didn’t shock Flowey. He wondered how these two would've handled all the Vegetoids and Froggits and the rest, if Chara hadn't gotten to all of them first.

The rest of the walk was quiet, and without any monsters to eradicate, puzzles to solve, or spider bake sales to support, they reached Toriel's house in a fraction of the time it had taken Chara. Rain Boots peeked in through the cracked window, shading their eyes from the diffuse, sourceless light that magically kept the Underground from complete darkness, while Blondie raised their fist to knock on the door.

"Oh, don't bother, you can go right in," said Flowey.

Blondie cocked their head, dropping their hand to rest idly on their gun. They were wearing black nail polish, stark against their pale fingers, though it had mostly chipped off. "Do you live here?"

"Not quite... but don't worry about it. The old lady who lived in this house has been gone for ages, and she won't be coming back."

Flowey gave his brightest, sunniest, _look-I'm-just-a-sweet-little-flower_ smile, effective on most monsters and precisely half of all the skeletons he’d ever met. He wasn't so sure how Blondie liked it, but Rain Boots had no qualms about pushing past and letting themself into the cute little house, at which point there was no choice but to follow. (Flowey knew the feeling.)

Like the good friend that he was, he led them down to the where the stone door loomed, twice as tall as both humans combined and a hundred times heavier. Below the engraved Delta Rune was a small, simple keypad with chunky gray buttons, not so different from what you might find on an electronic safe, or some storage room deep in the Core.

"This WAS the way out, but ever since Chara escaped, it's been closed off," he explained. "The only person who knows the password is Alphys herself."

The humans made a perfunctory effort at pushing open the door until their feet skidded back. Blondie experimentally punched a random number into the keypad until it beeped at them and the screen cleared. They pressed more buttons. Another beep. They tried again, and the door magically opened, just for them!

...No, just kidding, they accomplished nothing. Great job, Blondie! Beep!

"This is the _only_ way? Are you sure?" they asked.

"Yes, but that's a GOOD thing. As long as Alphys doesn't know you're here, you'll be perfectly safe. The other humans must be worried SICK about you two, right? I'm sure it won't take long at all for them to come looking for you, and until then, you can stay here. There's even a kid's room... there's only one bed, but there's the old lady's room, too, if you're both tired. It's perfect!"

Even as he spoke, Flowey sensed he'd taken the wrong approach. The humans exchanged a look.

"Nobody's gonna find us here," said Rain Boots.

"If we stayed here, we'd starve. We _have_ to keep going," added Blondie.

"And, plus... I wanna see the rest of the Underground, and real magic!"

"Magic is real, yes... but it's also INCREDIBLY dangerous. Even if you managed to escape from the RUINS, you would die. Undyne—"

Blondie interrupted. "We get it. You've already said that."

"Is Alphys super strong? If she came here and we surprised her, or something... or we just ran through before she could stop us..."

Flowey shook his head. "You really, REALLY would not want that to happen. Undyne is the greater threat, but Alphys could still EASILY destroy you both." _There_ was a sentence he’d never expected to say with a straight face.

Predictably, Blondie shrugged off their backpack and unzipped it, and Rain Boots decided it was _their_ turn to go press some random buttons. Humans were determined, and with that Determination came an amazing level of stubbornness. It didn't matter to him what they did, though; either they would tire themselves out with their pointless efforts and accept his suggestion of a cozy place to sleep, or else they would collapse from exhaustion. Both options perfectly suited his needs.

Flowey let out a long, long sigh. "If you don't want to heed my advice, I can't stop you," he said. "But... oh, gosh. I just hope that neither of you get hurt. You have no idea how dangerous this is."

* * *

Settled in the middle of the room, Blondie had claimed their friend's backpack and carefully spread out all of their belongings over the floor. Between the two, the humans had a ball of string, a set of toy binoculars, half a roll of duct tape, bug spray, candy bars, wadded candy _wrappers_ , and pink safety scissors—all belonging to Rain Boots—plus a water bottle, a tiny first-aid kit, a dented old cigarette lighter, a folded pocket knife, and a canister of tiny metal marbles—all Blondie's. They also fished out a few gray coins and a wad of little papers from their pockets, dropping both onto the nearest empty spot on the stone.

Behind them, the keypad beeped. Whether Rain Boots was going sequentially or guessing at complete random, Flowey didn't even want to know. He leaned down to examine Blondie's slips of paper, which were all decorated with pictures of buildings and grotesque human faces. "What are you looking for?"

"This is a puzzle. Puzzles are meant to have a solution. I just need to find the right combination of items." Blondie absently swept their cornsilk hair away from their face. If they knelt down any lower, it would drag on the floor. Seemed like a ridiculous hassle. "Then... then we'll force the door open."

"Interesting."

Flowey let his mind wander. Chara... Chara was going to be so surprised when he found them. Still irritated, maybe, because he hadn't parted with them on such good terms. But he would apologize—grovel, if he really had to—and then they'd come around, like always. Chara was the smart one, so much more perceptive than the naïve little kid he'd once been, and they understood him better than anyone. Once they got over their anger, they would realize that he hadn't truly meant to hurt them, and they would choose forgiveness, because they hadn't meant to hurt _him_ , either. They'd spared him. They never spared anybody, except for—there was Sans technically, plus a few merchants, but Sans was garbage and the others were unimportant—except for him. Their best friend. They'd left the Underground wearing that locket. _Their_ locket. Best friends forever.

The keypad beeped.

"You'll drive yourself crazy trying to guess that code," said Blondie.

"Better than YOU doing something stupid and hurting yourself."

Hoping to head off another round of meaningless jabber, Flowey jumped back in. "What will you do, even if you manage to escape this place? Alphys and Undyne will kill you as soon as they know you're here... and then they'll take your SOULs. ASSUMING another monster doesn't kill you first."

Blondie thought for a minute.

"We may not have magic powers like theirs, but normal human beings can be strong, too. And besides," they added, with a dimpled half-smile, " _Real_ adventures always have a 'final boss' at the end."

The delusion. The sheer. Blinding. _Delusion_. It was almost majestically disgusting, and that was the opinion of a creature who'd long ago abandoned any normal sense of morality. Chara had willingly followed him down that path, barely waiting for Toriel to turn her back before pouncing on those helpless Whimsuns and Froggits... but Flowey had no SOUL, and Chara only had one because they'd stolen it; _these_ two humans had no excuse. Was this why Chara felt such hatred toward their own kind? They never did explain their reasoning in much detail, even on the day they showed him their old scars and told him their reason for climbing the mountain. He'd known better than to pry.

Coming back down to Earth, Flowey tried to scrounge up a coherent response. "According to the old legends, travelers who climb Mt. Ebott will disappear. That didn't seem CONCERNING?"

Beep.

"Take a break already, or you're going to drive _me_ crazy," Blondie snapped.

Rain Boots made a face at them, but willingly turned away from the keypad. They tiptoed around all the junk and sat in the corner. "If you 'disappear,' you're not dead. It just means you went away somewhere, and nobody else knows where you went, is all," they said. "...Which is pretty much what we did, I guess."

Blondie flicked at the cigarette lighter, staring into the flame before snapping it shut.

"I dare you to set that number-lock-thing on fire and see what happens," said Rain Boots.

"It doesn't look flammable."

"Shoot it?"

"It'll ricochet."

"Whatever." Rain Boots slid down until they were flat on the floor, their head propped up at an uncomfortable-looking angle. "Hey, Flowey," they said, voice muffled by the collar of their hoodie. "Did that old lady who lived upstairs have a grandkid? You said there's a kid's room. Where did THEY go?"

Flowey looked up at the ceiling. "That room belonged to her son. Then she adopted a second child, and they moved away for a while... but both children died young, so she came back here. She never got over it." Not even in the runs where Flowey revealed his true identity. He'd assumed it was because she still grieved for Chara, a child she'd loved just as dearly as her biological son, but their reunion didn't leave her feeling very happy. Or... feeling. And now Rain Boots was practically rolling around in what was left of her dust like a chinchilla taking a sand-bath.

"Um. Yikes?"

"It happened a long time ago."

They pushed themself up with one elbow. "How many dead people is that? There's those kids, plus the old lady, Alphys' friend... it's disturbing." They glanced at their friend. "Even if they're all evil monsters."

At some point, Blondie had taken it upon themself to try their hand at the very fun and not at all annoying or futile pressing-random-buttons-until-they-beep quote-unquote _puzzle_. If Flowey had arms, he would've shrugged in reply, but instead he thought about what might happen if Blondie really did try shooting the door open. Probably nothing, sadly.

"What's so unusual? People die. That's how it is," he said.

Rain Boots laced their fingers over their belly and slid the rest of the way down. "I guess," they mumbled, eyes drifting shut.

Then they jolted upright, cracking the back of their head into the wall. A millisecond earlier _or_ later—Flowey couldn't even tell—Blondie gasped and jumped back from the door, their gun bouncing against their hip. From beneath the floor came a low rumble, more vibration than sound; Flowey sensed it through his tattered roots before he heard it, and imagined both humans could feel it, too.

"What's that? What the heck did you DO?"

"I don't know, I barely touched it!"

With a steady whir from some unseen motor, the door slowly ground open. Blind panic flashed through Flowey like electricity, but no one was standing outside, no violent mob or mutated fish monsters. Only the forest path leading to Snowdin, unchanged by the passage of time.

The humans stared out, saucer-eyed. Tentatively, Blondie stepped out onto the path. "Is this _real?_ " they breathed, raising their hands to catch the thin flurries of snowflakes that blew past. "It's... cold. Real cold. Real _snow_. How?"

Rain Boots scrambled up and after their fellow human, scooping up a fistful of snow and letting it crunch in their hands. "It's magic! Just like Flowey told us!"

A friendly smile stayed on his face as if the cold air had frozen it. No way, no way, there was no _possible_ way that a human, _especially_ some stupid little kid dressing up like they wanted to be a big tough soldier, could take a random guess and miraculously bypass an obstacle that _should_ be insurmountable. Flowey was the only truly intelligent creature in the Underground, and even he had no idea what combination Alphys had been using. If he ever worked up the courage—or despair—to leave the RUINS, he could just burrow out, so there was never any point in messing around with Alphys' stupid little security...

...measure...

Crap. Crap. Crap, crap, crap, crap. " _DAMN_ it," Flowey whispered to himself.

With his luck, Undyne might already be on her way. A fight against two humans was hopeless but a three-on-one fight would be even less fair, and he'd choose death over letting Alphys take those SOULs. Picking a fight was stupid, but stupidity was his only choice. That or _certain_ death.

"Hey, w-wait!" he called out, planting himself as close to the edge of the path without technically leaving the RUINS. "What about all your stuff? If you truly want to leave, I can't stop you, but you should at LEAST be fully prepared."

The afterimage of a smile was bright in Blondie's eyes as they turned back. "Oh. That was _stupid._ " Their expression slid back into a kid's attempt at stoicism as they motioned for Rain Boots to follow them back. "...Thank you."

They took up their backpacks and shoveled their belongings back inside. Flowey's thoughts were equally scrambled-around. He should attack while they were distracted, all he needed was a SOUL, either one of their SOULs, and then he could easily overpower the remaining human. Rain Boots looked smaller and weaker, easier to subdue, but then Blondie would be free to shoot at him. If he went for Blondie first, Rain Boots might not be as effective at defending their friend, but the struggle would be more prolonged, almost guaranteeing an injury he couldn't afford. Would it be better to grab one and cut his losses, even if it meant he couldn't cross the barrier... but what if the SOUL _rebelled_ , why hadn't he considered that? If he was taking a gamble no matter what, then he should go for both, and that brought him right back around to step one. Which one? Which one, which one, which one?

"Flowey! Helloooo?"

"Wh-...what..?"

Rain Boots giggled. "You were off in space, there." They rolled up the ball of string and tossed it in their bag. "I asked what you're gonna do when we leave. You said you're only here 'cause you're scared of Alphys..."

"Are you about to suggest we take him along?" asked Blondie.

"Maaaybe."

Go with them? It was an idea almost worth considering. Even if he eventually had to kill them to cross the barrier, the humans would make strong allies... just not strong enough to be more useful to Flowey than their SOULs. Without Undyne, the equation might work out differently, but so would a lot of things.

And every passing second was wasted time. He had to just _go_ for one, either one. And quick.

The next time Rain Boots glanced down at their bag, tangled bunches of vines shot up from the ground and coiled around them, snagging both wrists and curling around their face. The vines retracted, slamming them into the floor with a strained, muffled yelp.

"What was—" Blondie had the decency to freeze, staring uncomprehendingly at the ensnaring vines. Not so tough now, were they?

In the time it took Blondie to figure out what they were looking at, Flowey should have sent out more vines, but he'd already used up all that he had. No problem, vines weren't efficient at inflicting damage by themselves, even at full strength. Flowey pulled from his remaining energy reserves and summoned a miniature asterism of glowing magic bullets, only to spot Blondie making a grab for their gun. The attack swerved, changing targets midway through its flight, and Blondie was either completely taken off guard or else _really_ bad at dodging, because it hit them square-on and sent them tumbling back onto their butt. Their SOUL flashed blue in their chest, and Flowey heard a faint crack. Damage—less than he'd expected—but that was better than shattering the thing, so it was fine.

While his attention was directed toward Blondie, he felt a strangely distant stab of pain, as if in a body part not quite connected to the rest of him. The vines retracted by reflex, or _tried_ , because it was when they failed to move quite right that he realized he'd let them loosen enough for Rain Boots to bite down like a squirrel. Flowey couldn't afford to lose much more health before he was totally incapable of _any_ attack.

"Stay still already!" he snarled at the squirming human, and pulled the vines tighter. He only realized a moment later that by dragging them facedown, he'd made it so he couldn't see their SOUL. No problem, he'd rip it straight out of their body.

"I said—" Flowey struggled to generate another wave of magic. There was a flickering pulse of light that left him lightheaded, black dots dancing across his vision. "Stop—MOVING!"

There was another motion off to his side. He aimed his next attack just as he'd done before, but the bullets went wide and fizzled before they even reached the wall. He began to duck under the ground, sensing that things had gone hopelessly off-course, but then there was a bright flash that wasn't his magic, sweeping down in a thin arc—it was the same as when he'd taken those six SOULs and forced Chara into a fight, before they stopped and lowered their knife and told him to run—

Except that he wasn't spared, this time. There was pain across his face, down the center of his stem, and then he felt nothing.

* * *

* * *

The vines around the smaller human (creatively nicknamed "Rain Boots" by a certain little flower) twitched like dying snakes and slid away. The human rolled onto their hands and knees and spat out the stringy bits of plant matter stuck to their tongue. The other human (blessed with the equally inspired moniker "Blondie") dropped the not-quite-so-safe safety scissors and staggered to their friend's side. There were thin cuts across the inside of their fingers where the delicate skin had pressed into one of the opened blades.

"Did he hurt you? You're not—you're not hurt, are you?"

Rain Boots stared down at the little scraps of petals and yellowed stem, the remains of the wilted little flower that had been Flowey. With his face gone, he didn't look any different from the others that grew where they had fallen. They wiped their face with their sleeve.

"Why... why'd he do that?"

Blondie pressed on their finger and grimaced, licking away the welling drops of blood, and searched around in their backpack with their uninjured hand for the first-aid kit. "I don't know," they said, tactfully avoiding the _I told you so!_ that might have been running through their mind at that moment. "I didn't... it wasn't that I _meant_ to... do that. You saw how it happened, didn't you? I didn't want to kill him, but he was about to kill _you_." They tore open the paper packaging around the bandages with their teeth.

Rain Boots said nothing.

"Do you need one of these?"

"I'm okay."

"You _saw_. That flower wasn't going to listen, if I just told it to stop."

Blondie flexed their fingers and readjusted the bandages, waiting for an answer that didn't come. When they noticed the blankness on their friend's face, they crawled over and hugged them. "Don't worry, you're only... it was just a surprise."

"Why'd he DO that?"

"I don't know."

The hug helped. A little. Rain Boots leaned their head on their friend's shoulder. "He was NICE. Why'd he suddenly do that?"

"We shouldn't have trusted him. We both did, so it's my fault, too."

"I did first."

Blondie looked over Rain Boots' head as a thin layer of snow formed in the doorway, carried into the RUINS by the icy wind. They shivered and pulled back to retrieve their gun, which at some point in the scuffle had slipped from their shoulder and gotten kicked aside. They offered their good hand to help Rain Boots to their feet.

"I didn't wanna hurt it," Blondie repeated, as if saying the words often enough would make them truer. "You saw that, didn't you? It's not a sin if it's... if you..."

"Can we leave now?"

"...Yeah. Okay."

The humans averted their eyes as they stepped around Flowey's remains. Hand-in-hand, they ventured back out onto the frozen path. The landscape beyond the RUINS was silent as a painting, the trunks of the more distant trees black against the blue-tinged snow, the high, leafless branches blending into the darkness of the... not a sky. Not quite a sky. But snow was falling from somewhere, fluttering in soft, fat flakes. The humans' breath formed alternating puffs in the cold air.

Blondie glanced to the edges of the forest, warily checking the bush just outside the door. A closer look would have revealed a surveillance camera, but Flowey’s warnings only mentioned bloodthirsty monsters eager to rip their SOUL from their chest, and this place was quiet. Peaceful, even. They gently tugged their friend's hand, pulling them along.

"Isn't it pretty?" they prompted, in a voice that was a little _too_ gentle, too obviously an attempt to sound soothing.

Rain Boots rapidly blinked. They swallowed. They looked up at the void where a sky should have been. Snowflakes fell into their hair. "Yeah," they mumbled.

The humans walked, still holding hands, into the silent forest.


	2. Hindsight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't like spoiling specific story details, but in the interest of being kind to readers, here's a final reminder to make sure you've looked at all the tags, especially if you haven't read the first two fics in this series. If you _have_ read them, and you're still here after chapters 8 and 9 of Triage, I think you'll be fine.

_WELCOME TO SNOWDIN_ the sign announced, sparkling with draped garlands of string lights.

Rain Boots’ teeth chattered. The boots for which Flowey had named them were ideal for keeping their feet dry, but the thin rubber was worthless against the cold.

"You should've worn heavier clothes like I told you," said Blondie, their concern for their friend evidently wearing thin. "And better shoes, like mine."

"I thought we'd find, like, a cool cave. I didn't know we'd end up in a Christmas card. Except—where did all the monsters go?"

As the humans traveled through the forest, they had found a lumpy lamp, a series of sentry posts—all unoccupied, luckily for them—and a sign with an inexplicable warning about married dogs, with a disappointing lack of actual dogs in the vicinity. Then there were more little games, puzzles, much like those they had encountered in the RUINS, but these, too, were already completed, with Xs turned to Os and hollow spots in the snow where spikes had once blocked the path. There was a frozen clearing with a snowball sitting at one end, but when Rain Boots nudged it into the hole on the opposite side, nothing happened.

Every step was captured by surveillance cameras, which neither human noticed, but as they'd neared Snowdin, they could hear the distant wail of a siren. They'd exchanged a quizzical look and kept walking, the sound rising and falling but growing steadily louder as time went on, until the town appeared in the distance. Then it had stopped.

"I didn't return your scissors after I took them from your bag. I forgot until just now," Blondie suddenly announced, turning away from the sign.

"I'm sure as heck not going back for them. C'mon, let's look around."

The shop was locked when Rain Boot tried to go in. The inn next door wasn't, but they found no one at the front desk, and on top of that, some monster had taken the time to drag a couch in front of the stairway. When the humans stood very quietly, there was a faint skitter of claws on wood over their heads. Small animals hiding in the ceiling, maybe. Blondie kept a hand resting on their BB gun.

Next, Grillby's. The restaurant was warm and smelled a little like wet dog, though there was, tragically, no visible evidence of dogs in the vicinity. The jukebox in the corner played a bouncy melody; a few scattered trays of food sat out, lukewarm and half-eaten. In the nearest booth, an untouched strawberry ice cream sundae slowly melted.

Rain Boots chose to state the obvious. "It's like they all got up and disappeared."

"They must have expected us," said Blondie. A pink puddle was forming under the ice cream dish, and they did a terrible job of pretending they weren't staring.

"Why would MONSTERS run away from two kids?"

"They could be planning an ambush. We shouldn't stay in one place for too long."

"Yeah. Maybe."

They went back out into the cold. An enormous tree stood in the center of town, wreathed in tinsel and surrounded by wrapped presents, but any sense of festive cheer had been effectively snuffed out by Blondie's gloomy prediction. The curtains in the windows of some of the cute, cozy houses were drawn tight, with only occasional flickers of motion as the humans passed by, glimpses of nervous eyes that disappeared each time either of them turned back to look. Other houses appeared abandoned, the largest of which stood near the center of town, its windows uncovered and the interior dark. Beyond that was either a library with a misspelled sign or a completely unremarkable librarby, and then an empty snowfield.

Flowey's description of the Underground was vague, but it never implied that it was _just_ a snowy, lonely landscape; somewhere beyond this eerie little ghost town, Alphys awaited.

The wind picked up as the humans traveled east, snow blowing into their faces until their eyes stung. Rain Boots shivered harder than before, and their friend stole worried glances at them, blond hair whipping behind them. They touched the top button of their coat, but didn't offer to give it up.

They walked until the wind died down and the snow gave way to gray stone, then the mouth of a low-roofed cavern. Neither human had a flashlight, so Blondie dug through their backpack for the cigarette lighter, which turned out to be unnecessary. The air was warmer inside the cave, humid from the water falling in sparkling sheets; gemstones studded the walls, spangling the dark stone with more than enough light to guide the humans along. Cyan flowers sprouted at the edges of the path, their glowing petals rustling with a sound like soft whispers. Rain Boots did their best to keep their distance from the murmuring flowers as they followed the path of the river.

"I said I wanted to see magic, but something that isn't flowers would be... nice?" said Rain Boots.

" _Would be... nice? Would be... nice? Would be... nice?_ " the echo flowers... echoed. In unison, the humans jumped, but the flowers just bobbled harmlessly in a nonexistence breeze.

"None of these ones have faces," Blondie commented, cautiously poking a flower with the end of their gun.

" _None of these ones have faces... none of these ones have faces... none of these ones have faces..._ "

"They just repeat stuff?" asked Rain Boots. "Weird."

" _They just repeat stuff? Weird... they just repeat stuff? Weird... repeat stuff? Weird..._ "

Rain Boots leaned over a blossom as if it were a microphone. "Hi, I'm Flower the Flower, and I'm a huge butt!"

" _Hi, I'm Flower the Flower, and I'm a huge butt! Hi, I'm Flower the Flower, and I'm a huge butt! Hi, I'm Flower the Flower, and I'm a huge butt!_ "

Blondie rolled their eyes. The echo flowers went on cheerfully insulting themselves as the humans left them behind, passing deeper into the caverns. Even with the light of the gemstones, this place was darker than Snowdin, more desolate, with water dripping from the ceiling, forming deep pools that seemed to go on forever when one of the humans paused to look down. At least Snowdin resembled a place where humans like them might live; here, these was nothing, and no one.

Until there wasn't.

The humans needed none of Flowey’s advice to sense danger from the knight that waited for them at the end of the tunnel, nearly melding into the shadows. Her black armor bristled with spikes underneath a black cloak, and her helmet was shaped to mimic the look of jagged teeth. They could see no hint of the monster within, but she was taller than most adult humans.

Blondie's hands went to their gun. For the moment, they kept the barrel pointed down and their finger off the trigger. "What do you want."

This time, Rain Boots didn't complain about their friend's more aggressive approach, though they did attempt a friendly smile at the monster knight. "Hi? Are you Undyne?" they asked politely. "That's your name, right? We heard about you. I-if... uh... you're not actually somebody else. 'Cause then, we probably didn't."

A vertical, catlike pupil shone white behind one of the helmet's eye slits. Lower down was a small pin that held the knight's cloak in place at the shoulder, and when Rain Boots nervously broke eye contact, it was there that their focus settled. Plain, dark metal, like the rest of her armor, and shaped like an interlocked pair of feathered wings.

Symbolic associations aside, it was only a pin, but this detail might have seemed encouraging to Rain Boots—a slavering undead wouldn't bother with decorations, even modest ones, would it?—because they kept looking at it, until Undyne spoke. The word she said was _why_ , but to untrained or uncaring ears, a sickly gurgle emanated from under her helmet, like the sound of a person trying to speak with their head submerged in a thick liquid.

Rain Boots looked to their friend for help and was offered none. "Uh... can you say that again?"

Undyne slowly walked closer, heavy boots on stone, until she'd halved the distance between herself and the humans. Blondie raised their gun in warning, which had no impact whatsoever on how far or how quickly she moved. She made another ambiguous sound, a sigh or cough or growl, then enunciated each word with a cold, careful fury that made even Blondie visibly nervous. "What. Do you think. You're doing. You brought a weapon down here. And that dust..."

She paused. A being who knew her would have recognized the incremental shift in her posture, the slightly lessened tension around the shoulders. To a pair of frightened human children, she was still a big monstrous knight, so the specifics of her emotional state were neither readable nor relevant. "No, we've watched you since you left the RUINS. So who'd they kill?" she glanced to Blondie, who tried their best to glare back. "Some other human? Or was it that flower?"

The ground around the humans' feet began to glow, and Rain Boots got their wish of seeing some non-floral magic as two rings of spears stabbed up around them and Blondie, trapping them both where they stood. The ends of the spears came to splintered points like broken bones; Rain Boots gasped and tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go. Blondie took the more proactive approach of shooting at Undyne from over the spear-points, which

**[̤̻͖̲͖͉ ͏̯̜D͇͈̣͈͔̟͙o͈͈̬̗͕n͖'̵̫̖t̯ ͙͔̻̰w͓̲͡o҉̤̳̤̮̠̰̺ṛ̤͔r̷̼͕̦y̘͖̩̬ ̺̺͠a̛͙̪b̪̣̺͖̹̬̳o͝ut̡͖̣̞̭̤ ̺͈̩͓i̳̘̩̲̤͡t̟̜̮̹̳ͅ.̳̙͜ ̭̮̗̝]̪̮̭͙̩̤ͅ**

sent a pellet flying _away_ from her until it pinged harmlessly off a wall. She grabbed the gun from their hands with an irritable growl from the back of her throat.

"Hey!"

"D-do you mean Flowey?" Rain Boots cut back in, futilely trying to salvage the situation."He went nuts and attacked, so they protected me. We didn't mean to do anything bad, he tried to KILL us!"

"'Didn't mean to?' After you came to the Underground with THIS?" Undyne threw the BB gun aside. "And you used it once already. You knew what you were doing."

"I brought it to keep people like _you_ away. You're here to steal our SOULs." Blondie accused.

Undyne didn't deny it. She folded her arms. "Tell me something... what happened to Frisk? If you're here, alive, after all this time, then someone must have stopped them."

"We haven't even SEEN any monsters except for you. If we did, we weren't gonna fight them. Honest," Rain Boots whined.

"They're not a monster. Frisk is a human... or so we thought. They took EVERYTHING from us... and then they wanted to return to the surface to destroy humanity." The spears bristled, and Undyne's words shook with barely-restrained fury, but this wasn't the type of anger the humans must have expected. They stared at her in bewilderment, which only made her more frustrated. "Why am I the one explaining all this to YOU?! You LIVE up there!"

"I d-don't know! We don't know anything! Nobody destroyed anyone, if... that's what you're... worried about..?"

"If you don't know anything about them, then why did you come here, and why were you armed? As far as you two should know, the monsters under Mt. Ebott are nothing more than a fairy tale. Don't try to lie to me. I KNOW."

Despite their fear, Rain Boots leaned in closer, hands gripping the spears in front of them like the bars of a prison. "But we. DIDN'T. We just wanted to climb the mountain to... 'cause we wanted to. We didn't know we'd find a place like this, or that there would be monsters. We didn't come here to hurt anyone. Even if we WANTED to kill a bunch of people, we're just KIDS. There's no way we could—"

Undyne cut them off with a harsh, scraping laugh. "Tell that to Alphys. Try that with literally ANYONE."

"Shut up! This isn't funny!" Blondie snapped, to no avail. But Undyne did, at least, let Rain Boots go on speaking without further interruption.

"Flowey, um... he, um... told us about you and... Alphys is the queen, right? Alphys? He said lotsa bad stuff about her and you, like you were a crazy evil zombie, but he also tried to kill us, so maybe he was lying? He was definitely lying about SOME stuff. And if you're worried about someone hurting other people, then you can't be a... a BAD monster... and just 'cause we're humans, that doesn't mean we're bad, either. Right? It doesn't?"

Undyne was silent. As if she might be pondering their words.

She flexed her fingers, adjusted her grip on a new spear as it bled into existence. "Maybe you really are innocent, and you just made a stupid mistake by coming here. I'd believe it. If you fell down here seven years ago, maybe we even could've become friends. But now... now, there's nothing I can do to help, even if I WANTED to let you two go free. Frisk made sure of that."

Rain Boots pressed back against the spears as Undyne came closer, but they didn't budge. "You... d-don't have to..."

"That's stupid. You don't have to kill us, you don't have to do anything, you're _deciding_ to be evil. Flowey was telling the truth about what you are."

Undyne stopped to consider their words, idly flipping around the spear in her hand. Rain Boots kept pushing against the spears in the ground as if they might be able to force themself through, not that their odds of outrunning Undyne were very good.

"Yeah. Maybe he was." Undyne raised her spear. With Rain Boots penned in as they were, a certain idiom involving fish and barrels might have be either incredibly apt or incredibly inappropriate, depending on one's viewpoint.

Blondie frantically looked around, their BB gun hopelessly out of reach, and grabbed the most obvious alternative: a spear. There were plenty of them. They pulled hard, until it snapped with an odd buzzing crack and prompted Undyne to look up. She let out a bubbling sigh.

"It wouldn't even be FAIR for you to fight me. I can't get hurt. You already saw what happens when you try."

The blond human didn't answer, desperately clutching the splintered, broken energy spear. And they didn't attack her.

And.

There were several reasons why _no_ human SOULs were taken during the war between humans and monsters; the mismatch in strength between the two species, while insurmountable in terms of the war's final outcome, wasn't enough to protect every single human warrior from their own stupidity or bad luck, or from clever strategy on the part of the monsters. If these two children were truly so ignorant of the legends surrounding Mt. Ebott, then it was unlikely that they would know this.

But humans were humans. And thus Blondie, (whose true name almost definitely wasn't Blondie), not unlike those who had gone on before them, made—so it would seem—this calculation:

One, Undyne intended to take their SOUL.

Two, a SOUL taken by a monster was as good as damned. A SOUL that was shattered might not be much better, but it couldn't be used to harm their human friends, and there always existed the possibility of a miraculous life after death. In a certain sense. Maybe.

So the blond human took a deep breath, closed their eyes, and flipped the spear around. Undyne shouted and threw herself at them, but she hadn't anticipated _that_ and hesitated a fraction of a second too long, dissipating the spears and grabbing Blondie only after they'd shattered their own SOUL. They were limp in her hand and she immediately recoiled, letting the corpse slide to the ground with a thump, pale hair spilled across their back.

Rain Boots screamed. They scrambled back but the spears were gone, they stumbled and lost their balance and huddled on the floor, arms over their head as they screamed. And screamed. The sound bounced off the enclosing walls of the tunnel, a sound like an ice pick, and Undyne's boots clanked and she gurgled obscenities. Her breathing went funny, but Rain Boots didn't notice, ignoring their surrounds and Undyne and everything else, as if they could block out reality with their screams, like a protective wall of pure sound.

As far as they could have known—with their face pressed to their knees, they wouldn’t have seen when Undyne stepped back from the humans, eye unfocused as she motioned in the air, interacting with something only she could sense—their strategy worked.

* * *

As if it had all been a terrible nightmare, the humans were back in the RUINS where they began, in the middle of an abandoned house.

Blondie's hands flew to their chest, to their intact SOUL and strongly-beating heart. The stick-on bandages around their fingers were gone, the skin unbroken.

Rain Boots uncovered their face, looked around, then threw themself at Blondie and grabbed them, two fistfuls of coarse camouflage fabric. Being considerably smaller than Undyne and somewhat smaller than Blondie, their attempt at shaking their friend was an awkward failure. "Why'd you DO THAT?!"

Blondie swayed a little. Their BB gun was hanging over their shoulder, just as it had been, not that it been any help so far. "I—had to. You saw we couldn't fight her. I couldn't... just... and Flowey said—where is he?!" They spun around with Rain Boots still attached. Flowey had been right behind them when they first passed by this spot, but now he was nowhere to be seen.

"WHY? That was stupid, that was messed up, you DIED! What if Flowey lied, what if she didn't do her thing, wh-what if... you died! That's your SOUL! What if you stayed dead?!"

"Sh-she was going to kill us both. What else could I do?"

"Attack HER!"

"It wouldn't have _worked_."

Rain Boots sniffled. "You shoulda tried anyway."

"I did!"

"Yeah, ONCE."

"I saved us both!"

"No you DIDN'T!"

Blondie shoved Rain Boots but failed to detach them. "We need to find a way out. Forget everything else," they said, slowly prying the clawing fingers off their jacket. "Or we'll wait here. Somebody... might come and help us."

"You KNOW they won't."

Just as Rain Boots said this, there were footsteps outside the house. Their eyes went wide in wonder, then horror; the steps were heavy and metallic. They released Blondie's jacket and Blondie grabbed their wrist and they ran.

The first refuge they could find was the bedroom Flowey had promised them. Rain Boots locked the door as Blondie dragged the toybox aside, motioning for their friend to help shove the bed in front of the door. Blondie held a finger to their lips and crouched against the wall with Rain Boots beside them, hands over their mouth to silence their too-fast breathing.

Undyne was now inside the house, they could hear the front door squeak. Her boots clanked across the floor. And the humans had just trapped themselves. Given that Undyne had somehow managed to enter from the _front_ door, and that the way out of the RUINS was still sealed off, the humans would have had no clear escape route no matter what. Their choice of action still wasn't very helpful.

Blondie must have realized this. They set their gun down, shimmied their backpack from their shoulders, and quietly rooted around for their pocket knife. Unfolded, the blade was no longer than their finger, but the tip came to a clean sharp edge, shiny in the low light.

"What are you doing with that?" Rain Boots hissed.

"Be quiet," Blondie whispered back.

"You have your gun. What do you need that for?"

"It's backup. I might need to—"

"NO."

"I won't use it unless I have to, so shut up. Before she hears us."

Rain Boots tried to snatch the pocket knife away, nearly impaling their hand on it before Blondie could get it out of their reach. Their voice squeaked, restrained but already too loud. "Give it to me! I'm not letting you DO that again!"

"Don't be an idiot! She'll—"

They tipped sideways and Rain Boots took this opportunity to tackle them and make another grab for the knife. Blondie rammed an elbow into Rain Boots' stomach, forcing out a breathless _oof_ , but them they just squirmed to the side and latched stubbornly onto Blondie's arm like an octopus. Blondie's hiking boots thumped into the wardrobe as they struggled to dislodge the other human; Rain Boots was laughably weak, but Blondie had hair falling around their face and no arms at their disposal, with one maintaining a death-grip on the pocket knife and the other squished across their chest.

"GIVE IT!"

"She'll hear us, get _off_!"

"Not—until—you hand it—gghh—over!"

Rain Boots reached for the knife, letting off a little pressure from Blondie's arm. Blondie blindly elbowed Rain Boots just under the collarbone and rolled, pinning the smaller human to the floor with a knee on their stomach and the knife still held far away.

The doorknob rattled.

Blondie's head snapped up. "Oh no oh—"

Rain Boots grabbed a handful of blond hair and pulled. Blondie gasped in pain and dropped the knife and dove for it again before Rain Boots could squirm free and get there first. They were rewarded for their effort by having Rain Boots glom back onto them, which was exactly the less-than-advantageous position they'd just escaped five seconds earlier.

While the humans brawled, Undyne kicked open the door, but the bed was heavy enough that the wood just splintered instead of opening, she had to kick it again to push the bed farther away.

There was no time for Blondie to think, but little thought was required. Rain Boots was on top of them with both hands wrapped around Blondie's wrist from trying to force it up, it only stayed pressed down into the floorboard because Blondie was stronger, so if they'd had a few extra seconds to spare, they would probably have either gone on wrestling for the knife or frozen up, as they did when Flowey first turned on them. Both scenarios would have ended in failure, both humans impaled.

Rain Boots was breathing heavily. Outlined against their chest was a vibrant purple SOUL. They were pulling as hard as they could on Blondie's arm.

And.

After the half-second it took for Undyne to get into the room, Blondie's hands were slippery with blood. Cleanly shattering a SOUL wasn't so easy when it was a moving target, when it wasn't their own, when they already knew what it felt like to have the culmination of one's being destroyed. Especially with a stubby little folding knife instead of an energy spear.

Blondie didn't look at their friend, or at Undyne. Their hands were pressed on the floor, bloody fingers splayed out, face blank. "If you want our SOULs, you have to start over now," they said. If they were thinking strategically, they would have gone for their own SOUL next, denying Undyne the option of cutting her losses and settling for a single human SOUL. Whatever they were thinking about, it wasn't strategy.

Undyne grabbed them, dangled them off the ground by the collar, but they barely flinched. She demanded to know what the hell they had just done, what was wrong with them. Their friend was facedown on the floor.

"Make it so this didn't happen. Please," Blondie said, in a small voice.

Undyne obliged.

* * *

As if it had all been a terrible nightmare, the humans were back in the RUINS where they began, in the middle of an abandoned house. Except it wasn't all just a bad dream. They were still in the Underground.

Rain Boots hit Blondie in the stomach with all their strength and ran down the hall. A door slammed.

It was a weak strike, but Blondie doubled over and gagged, covering their mouth. Smooth, dry skin. Clean hands. Unmarked by cuts or scratches, unstained by blood or anything else. They breathed raggedly, swallowed, and staggered after Rain Boots.

"C... Clear?"

The first bedroom was empty. They heard a muffled sob from the next room over.

"Clear?" Blondie tried to enter, but they were locked out. If they were Undyne, they could have kicked in the door, but that might not have elicited the response they wanted. "You were right. You were right. I shouldn't have done that. Even if it meant—I, I shouldn't have. It was pure evil. I'm sorry." They pressed their forehead into the wall. "If I let you have my knife and you cut me, will we be even? Can we do that? It would be all right with me."

No luck.

Blondie's eyes darted back toward the other room. Flowey was nowhere in sight, and they didn't hear Undyne in her armor. They waited a few minutes, standing alone in the hallway while Rain Boots—or rather, Clear—cried, but but nobody came.

Blondie wandered back through the house and found themself in a kitchen. On the counter was a massive pie with a single perfect slice cut away. They couldn't have known how long it had been there, but the crust cracked and flaked when they pressed their fingers in, and it smelled wonderful. Cinnamon and butterscotch.

Their dull eyes revived, brimming with tears, which they quickly blinked away. "I didn't mean to. I only... I had to..." they mumbled to no one. "I'm sorry."

Their breath hitched.

"I wanna go home."


	3. A Cold Medium

Clear had cocooned themselves in the once-immaculate quilt on Toriel's bed, dusty boots and all, their whimpers muffled against the pillow.

Their crying died down to a few scattered hiccups, and they allowed their gaze to drift across the room, landing on the vase of golden flowers on top of the bookshelf. They nearly fell back into the gap between the bed and the wall, but the flowers were withered and harmless, drooping low on their limp stems. Clear scooted forward, bringing the quilt with them, and inspected the space under the bed. They found no monsters, no marauding plants, but instead..?

With one last wary glare at the dead flowers, they left the warmth of the quilt to investigate, sweeping an arm under the bed. Out came a tangled heap of broken plastic, complete with a cracked lens that dropped little shards of glass when they picked it up. A camera. Or rather, pieces of what had once been a camera. The only intact component seemed to be the battery, dangling by a single frayed wire, and so, like any human on an adventure, Clear pocketed this item before they left the bedroom.

There was a large mirror on the wall. Brown eyes gazed blearily into brown eyes; their curly hair was frizzy on one side from the pillow. Just them. Their own face.

In the other room, Blondie sat on the floor in front of Toriel's reading chair, softly murmuring in what sounded like prayer. When Clear entered, their face lit up with a kicked-puppy hope, laced heavily with fear.

"Are you—?"

Clear walked faster. They pulled the smallest chair from the table and dragged it to the kitchen, found a glass in a high cabinet, and filled it.

From their raised vantage point, the human noticed Toriel's butterscotch-cinnamon pie, intimidating in size despite the missing slice and suspiciously hand-shaped holes in the crust. Evidently more thirsty than hungry, they finished their water and carefully placed the glass in the sink, giving the pie nothing more than a curious look before hopping down.

The other human was in the doorway. "I told you that I'm sorry," they pleaded. "What else do you want me to do to prove it? Whatever it is, I _will_ , if you just tell me. I promise."

(Dangerous words. Even among humans, promises between best friends are sacred.)

In their anxious desire to make amends, Blondie seemed not to notice any problem with blocking the smaller human's only escape route from the room. Clear kept silent, and Blondie let out a loud sigh. "Or don't. But even if you're angry, we need to find a way to escape the RUINS before Undyne comes back, and that means you have to help me."

Clear took mercy on the other human, or else decided they were more afraid of being alone than of being near a person that had killed them, because they followed Blondie down to the basement, retracing the path where Flowey had led them, and sat on the bottom step while Blondie tapped at the keypad. Just like the first time, nothing useful happened. (Beep!)

"There _must_ be a way to force it open, but I couldn't think of one. I don't even know if there _is_ a correct code. It opened by itself, before."

Clear toyed with the battery in their hoodie pocket, pressing the edges into their fingers.

"I could shoot the panel and see what happens, if you’d like." Blondie offered, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. "...Are you going to help me, or not?"

For a time, it seemed that Clear was leaning toward the _or not_ option, before they unshouldered their bag and set it down. Almost as an afterthought, they took out the battery and set it on top of the backpack, then pushed the whole thing with their foot and sent it sliding across the floor.

"Where did _that_ come from?" Blondie asked, raising an eyebrow. They scrutinized the battery, letting it rest heavily on their palm. "Did you just find it?"

Clear scratched their hair, which only made it frizzier, and shrugged.

* * *

If Undyne was going to attempt another immediate attack, she clearly would have already done so; the point in time at which Alphys had let the humans out of the RUINS in the original iteration had also passed. 

Without Flowey acting as a distraction, Blondie searched through their and Clear's combined inventory. They read the safety warnings printed on the can of bug spray and set it aside, along with the cigarette lighter. The binoculars, judged irrelevant, went back into the bag, as did the delicious but useless candy bars. Moving on to two little bundles wrapped in hand towels, Blondie placed one of each into the two bags.

"What's that?"

Blondie looked up in surprise. "Pie."

"You stole some? How long was it even sitting there?"

Blondie rolled the ball of string in their hand. "It isn't theft if it's abandoned. And we might be trapped here for a long time, with those monsters," they tried to rationalize. "If you're talking again, does that mean you're not angry at me anymore?"

"No."

"I told you I was sorry. I'm _still_ sorry. What am I supposed to do?"

"Nothing."

"What if I can find a way out?"

"You're not gonna just sit in the RUINS forever, no matter if I say yes or no."

Blondie scowled and snatched up the scissors. Clear flinched back—but Blondie was only snipping off a length of string from the roll.

Much as Clear had predicted, Blondie steadily worked. They sprayed the bug on the floor until it formed a foul-smelling puddle, then rolled the string in the liquid until it was soaked. They bundled up the battery in the string, leaving the other end hanging limp, then carefully placed the battery on the little ledge formed by the top of the keypad where it stood out from the door.

Despite their discomfort, Clear watched curiously from their vantage point at the stairs. "What are you doing?"

"Stay back there."

"That’s what I was gonna do, anyway..."

Blondie retrieved their cigarette lighter and edged close to the panel. They took a deep breath to steady themselves, flicked the lighter, held it to the end of the wick, and then shrieked as it instantly erupted in flames. They dropped the lighter and ran, setting off another flare as it landed in the puddle; they made it about halfway across the room before dropping to the floor with their arms over their head. With a _BANG!_ made louder by the enclosed space, the heated battery exploded.

(Would this little trick have worked in the surface world? Would it have ended with Blondie setting themself on fire and traumatizing their friend for a third time? Difficult to say.

But the Underground, filled with magic and monsters and colored-tile puzzles with live piranhas, operates according to a generous standard of logic, one which affords human interlopers far more power than they could wield aboveground—and as Alphys had once remarked, the batteries in those cameras packed a punch.)

As the dust literally settled, one could hear the laborious scrape of metal on metal and a grinding groan that emanated from the floor. The explosion hadn't blown open the door as the humans might have hoped, but it had instantly incinerated the battery and reduced the keypad to a blacked smudge, which triggered the door's opening before the mechanism caught on itself and screeched to a stop.

A wisp of cool air drifted into the basement.

Clear had scrambled halfway up the stairs, but their eyes brightened with wonder as they ventured back down. Blondie blinked and lowered their arm, then hissed as they their hand brushed their clothing. Clear edged closer still, nervously eyeing the other human's injury, then coughed, waving away smoke.

After splattering their hands with a flammable liquid and then playing with fire, Blondie was lucky not to have suffered a worse injury. The little bandages in their first-aid kit were only good for little cuts, but a few bites of butterscotch-cinnamon pie would easily heal the injury, and then they could proceed on their doomed adventure no worse for wear. Toriel, if she were still alive, would have been happy to have helped; she was more loving toward human children than any biological human parent.

Unaware of the magical properties of monster food, Clear awkwardly helped pull Blondie to their feet by their uninjured hand. The gap in the partially-opened door was small, but so were the humans; after wiggling through, Blondie scampered off to the edge of the path and plunged their burned hand into the snow, biting their lip to silence any sound of pain.

Clear hugged themself against the cold and looked down the path, lost in their inscrutable human thoughts. "Is your hand okay?" they asked.

Blondie raised it. Underneath the speckles of snow, their pale skin had turned furiously red all across their palm, with blisters were already forming on their fingertips.

"I guess... not..."

"I'll be all right." Blondie slid their hand back into the snow. "Does this mean you're not mad at me anymore?"

Clear laughed uncomfortably. Blondie didn't.

"It isn't a funny question. I found a way out. I said that I would, and I did. That should mean you forgive me."

"That’s not how it works. Why is this such a big deal, anyway?"

"Because it _is_. Why would it _not_ matter? You're my friend. And." Blondie looked down. "...Murder is a sin. Flowey was trying to kill us, so, that may be different, but... ...that _was_ different."

Clear rolled their eyes. The wind swept past and they pushed their hands into their hoodie pocket. "You aren't gonna annoy me into saying what you want."

"That isn't _fair_ ," Blondie whined.

"Says who?"

"I saved you! _Three_ times—and four if you count _this._ " Blondie indicated the half-open door with their good hand. The mechanism within the door continued to grind like a massive set of teeth. "I shouldn't have hurt you, it was _horrible_ , but you're all right _now._ "

"You murdered me!"

"Undyne went back in time to fix it. Which is what I _knew_ she would do."

"So SHE'S the one that saved me from YOU. You're helping yourself by getting us out of the RUINS, it doesn't even count."

"You're just rubbing it in, now."

"I'm WHAT? You. Killed. Me. And now you think what you did doesn't matter at all? Don't be an idiot."

"I'm the only one that's done _anything_ useful the whole time we've been here! What have _you_ done except attack _me_ and get us both caught, and then cry?!"

"This was all your idea! It's YOUR fault we're even HERE and if we both die that's YOUR fault too!" Clear screamed back, their breath coming out in furious white puffs and their piping voice carrying a long distance through the empty forest. "If she'd even real then God's gonna HATE you for THAT!"

Clear was running, for the second time that day, even before Blondie lunged for them, leaving the path behind as they darted between the trees. Exasperated, Blondie grit their teeth and chased after them.

* * *

* * *

Undyne was staring into the dull eyes of a human with bloodied hands and a tarnished SOUL. She jolted, the way Alphys sometimes did when she woke up from a nightmare—

And she was in the throne room. Daisy (a Knight Knight, the younger recruits, exceptional defenses but middling attack power even with training) had been giving a report about... something Hotland-related on behalf of her and Lace (slightly older than their partner and newly-minted as a Whimsalot, great to see but _what was even going on_ with their stat distribution), Undyne was paying attention the first time and only the first time because it wasn't important anymore.

"Undyne..?"

Alphys had a polite smile pasted on her face as she signaled for quiet from the guards.

Go back to the RUINS and immediately kill them? Just kill them now. But they knew to expect it. Damn it. God. Strategically it was smart, but what kind of sick and twisted kid even had it in them to do _that_? She knew of another human who did, but _that_ one never even had real friends, and barely even qualified as a human.

"Hey, guys? Could you give us a minute, please?"

Before the guards could move, Undyne motioned for them to stop. "No, wait. I... just had a vision. Humans. Here in the Underground."

It always felt gross to play up the _ooh, I'm a mystical slime-dust-zombie who sees the past and future_ angle—and if she was going to spend the rest of her life roleplaying as an anime character, couldn't she be a magical girl instead of one of those ooky-spooky white-haired oracles who always ended up dead or evil?—but when you died and were brought back as a shambling wreck who spent a disturbing amount of time muttering about the surface world and Frisk and revenge, there were only so many possible interpretations that the people around you might reach. By the time words like _prophecy_ and _angel_ began to mean anything, it was too late to reload her SAVE file and shut the hell up. And so came certain... expectations.

Alphys gripped the arms of the throne. Daisy, who was normally fighting off a yawn every two minutes, let out a surprisingly squeaky gasp and glanced aside to see what Lace would do.

Leaving the nervous silence unbroken, Lace slowly raised two fingers.

"Yeah. Two of them. They're... actually, go wait outside. They're in the RUINS right now, in two minutes they're gonna start trying to escape. They'll fail. They don't know the code for the door. They're secure for now."

Lace kept their hands half-raised as if they wanted to say something else, one reasonable possibility being some variant on _what the hell are you doing_ , probably. But Alphys went with it, turning back to the guards and startling Daisy out of a nervous yawn.

"You heard what she said. Out. Please."

As soon as the two younger monsters had vamoosed, Lace buzzing ahead while Daisy clomped along with her spiked (k)nightstick propped up on one shoulder, Alphys jumped off her seat, long skirt brushing the golden flowers that were slowly engulfing her throne. "The humans already hurt someone, didn't they," she said. "That's why you came back."

"Asriel. You figured out they were here, we went into lockdown, and we let them out, but he was already dead. They said it was self-defense. They're armed, though. One has a gun, the other has a knife. They didn't fall down here by accident."

A knife, a freaking _gun_. Six years of insisting that humans weren't all bloodthirsty murder-machines, that most of them were decent, normal people with families and weird phobias and favorite foods, and now this. Ridiculous.

Alphys, thank god, had the courtesy to not say _I told you so_.

"In that case, we shouldn't leave them in the RUINS too long. Unless there's a reason why we _should_?" Alphys paced halfway across the room, looking back as she waited for Undyne to interject. The flowers bobbed and bowed in her wake, their stems spindly and overgrown.

"Nah."

"Is Asriel okay now?"

Undyne shucked off her helmet and let it melt through her gauntlets, then felt her face to make sure everything was basically where it should be. As much as she liked not having to worry about her weird melty mug doing something disturbing while she was distracted, it was _so_ much easier to talk without the giant tin can over her head. "I went to the RUINS in the next cycle, but I was, uh, distracted. I didn't see him."

Alphys turned back. "How many times have we gone through this?"

"This is round three. As I said, we let them out of the RUINS, watched what they would do. They're kids, and one's dressed like a hunter or something, with a gun, and the younger one's covered in old dust. They walk around Snowdin without trying to do much of anything, and when I confront them in Waterfall, they say they fell down here by accident, which sounds like bullshit. Then the kid with the gun shattered their own SOUL. I went back and warped to the RUINS—uh, sorry about that, wasn't much time to explain—but they immediately destroyed their friend's SOUL instead. So." Undyne folded her arms. "Here we go again."

"I see. And if you go straight back... they'll immediately shatter their SOULs before you can take them."

"Not a strategy I want to encourage by letting them see it work more than once."

Alphys frowned. "They remembered after you loaded your SAVE file?"

"Yeah."

"Are you certain they weren't just acting on information from Asriel?"

"They coulda been, but they definitely also remember."

"Ugh." Alphys wrinkled her snout. 

It was the same problem Sans had faced, once upon a time, and Alphys' personal research into the _idea_ of alternate dimensions (plus being the brains of this operation in general) couldn't totally compensate for not actually remembering. It was sort of useful back when Undyne had to resort to save-scumming to get through any basic interaction without freaking out. Now, not so much.

Out in the hall, Undyne could hear a low snore, only partially stifled by a knight's helmet. Alphys laced her fingers together in thought, the oval lenses of her glasses glinting with the golden light of the sun through the barrier. "What do you think we should do, then? Theoretically, aside from Asriel being a risk... we _can_ afford to wait. Without your... help... it's what I might have done, anyway. Even if the humans know to be cautious, they can't keep their guard up forever. At some point, they'll get tired and—"

"I'm not killing a couple of kids in their sleep, however screwed up they might be."

_they'll still be dead any other way._

_Shut up._

"...Okay. That's, um... then how _should_ we do this? You know more about the humans' behavior than anyone, myself included, so..."

"I'll." Undyne thought for a minute, trying to ignore the tingle at the back of her neck. "We'll do what we did the first time. I'll give the order to lock down. Then we'll reconvene, let the humans out, and I'll take the SOULs."

* * *

The monitor transplanted from the lab in Hotland took up nearly the entire back wall of Asgore's old spare room, bathing the floor in a pale glow. Alphys was switching between video feeds.

Onscreen, a monster made of floral red paper (a textbook evasion tank, and she didn't know why their parents named them Georgia, but a more traditional pick might've been "Papyrus" so, whatever) folded into the shape of a graceful origami crane zoomed past, leading a pack of Temmies in the direction of their village. Armor wasn't super feasible for a paper monster, so it had instead opted to get laminated, and it made that weirdly satisfying _wobblewobblewobble_ sound as it moved, which helped in getting the Temmies to all move in the same direction. Or they were convinced that the paper monster was a giant Temmie flake.

(Pretty logical, since it had taken the form of a miniature construction vehicle made out of folded construction paper.)

Undyne stared blankly at the screen, fidgeting until Alphys probably wanted to strangle her to make the clanking stop. The paper monster from before fluttered in the opposite direction as before, this time taking the form of some kind of origami bird. The part of her mind that was basically a stupid fish bristled at the sight of one of her guards in _her_ home territory, which was extra stupid and irrational since she'd literally been the one to station them there. She had her own job to do outside of Waterfall, pretty soon, and she could only be in one place at a time.

"There's something else. They don't know about Frisk."

"The humans? You asked them?"

"Yeah. They didn't know what I was even talking about. Didn't seem to recognize the name."

Alphys switched to a different camera perspective. An amphibious monster with a sword on their belt was standing outside of Gerson's store, waving a webbed hand like they were absorbed in an argument. Alphys watched for a minute, then reached for her phone. "They could have been lying, for whatever reason. If not, then that is kind of strange," she said. "How old are they?"

"Uh... eleven? Twelve, maybe. Around as old as Frisk, when they first fell. Why's that matter?"

"Because if they're that age _now_ , then when Frisk actually left the Underground..." Alphys trailed off, watching in real time as her text message was received. The frog monster lowered their head in defeat and reluctantly moved on. Gerson didn't emerge from his shop to follow them. She moved on from Waterfall completely, checking Snowdin next. "...it's doubtful that they would remember anything specific from so long ago," she finished. "And that's _assuming_ they told you the truth."

"Yeah, but..." Undyne stopped to think. She hadn't actually considered that angle. "Frisk wanted to destroy humanity, and they had the power to do it... whoever defeated them should be a LEGEND for literally saving the world. At the very LEAST, people should remember the time when some homicidal kid with magic freakin' powers showed up and TRIED to burn down their city, and these kids are clueless. _How_? Did Frisk even make it down from Mt. Ebott?"

"I hope not," Alphys murmured darkly, then shook her head and swiveled back in her seat. "Um, n-not that this topic isn't important, but I think we should... ...Undyne."

The room was a little brighter now, the white of the snow making Undyne squint as she rested her arms on the back of the seat. The camera feed Alphys had switched to was focused on the door to the RUINS, what should have been an impassible physical barrier, not _exactly_ as impermeable as the magic one, but still plenty to keep the humans trapped.

But now the door cracked open a little, though the camera angle didn't provide a great look at it. Instead, it focused on two small sets of footprints in the snow, which moved straight out from the RUINS, looped around a little at the beginning of the path, then veered suddenly off into the trees.

"I thought y-you said that _we_ let them out of the RUINS," Alphys was saying. "How did they escape? Did they leave the path, the first time? Frisk didn't do that..."

"We _did_ let them out. I don't know how they did it. But they must be trying to avoid us... they know that I'll be looking for them, and that we know which way they originally went." Undyne felt a tiny, inexplicable sense of relief— _oh, thank god, they're not idiots_ —but the quaver in Alphys' voice killed it quick. "They haven't gotten to Snowdin yet, have they?"

"Not yet."

"Then I'll make sure they don't."

Alphys didn't look especially reassured. "You're going to fight them right now?"

From what Undyne had seen so far, _fight_ wasn't the right word, but whatever. "Yeah. I thought that was the point here."

"Well, yes, but... I thought, maybe a little later on..." Alphys looked down at her hands. "...We had this exact conversation last time, didn't we?"

"Nah, but good guess." The first time, they'd both been fairly gung ho about the whole impaling-the-humans thing. Now that the novelty (not to mention blind rage) had worn off, things were already going down a mildly different path. Not that it mattered much; if she preferred the first one, she could go back and pretend nothing had changed. She'd followed that kind of strategy plenty of times in the past, before the repetition and boredom killed whatever budding perfectionism her new power otherwise would've encouraged.

"...You don't need to worry about me, Alphys," Undyne added. "They literally can't hurt me. They tried."

Alphys sighed. "Sorry. I know it isn't rational to be worried. I know I shouldn't be." She gave the screen another nervous glance, then turned away. "Undyne? Um..." She reached out, waiting for permission. After Undyne gave a short nod, Alphys jumped up and slid her arms around Undyne's waist, face pressed against the front of her breastplate as if the cold metal somehow didn't bother her.

It annoyed Undyne at first, the way Alphys was so careful, like she was something fragile and nervous, liable to spook and run off. Only with time did she see how badly Alphys wanted to make up for what she'd done in the past, and show that her apologies hadn't been hollow. Six years later, Undyne wanted to tell her she didn't have to bother anymore, but she... actually sort of liked it. The asking.

She slid her arms around Alphys. They stayed like that for a minute.

As soon as she moved to pull away, Alphys let go, clutching her hands together. "...Please be careful, okay?"

Seven years had gone by—closer to six, for Undyne—but Undyne could never quite shake the sense that she looked younger than she should've been.

"Yeah, I will."

* * *

A little beyond the western edge of Snowdin, Undyne heard the distant sound of a siren. The town had no established guardposts or sentries, at their own request—more like a demand, really—and weren't even many cameras left, since they all seemed to fall victim to falling tree branches, stray kickballs, and lost mittens (which always fell in such a way that they _just happened_ to block their view) with a pretty remarkable regularity. Most often at night. Undyne wouldn't have caved to such a stupid request, whatever the few remaining townspeople thought they wanted, but it was also her fault that tensions had reached this point in the first place. But, okay, fine.

Undyne didn't come here much anymore.

The siren went dead. The streets were already deserted. Undyne watched the steam from her breath curl in the cold air. Felt her concern wisping away, too.

It wasn't that she just _pretended_ to care, whether about Alphys or any other monster or the Underground in general. It was just easy to forget she was supposed to care, once they were out of her sight. Having the ability to jump back in time to before any kind of mishap made it even easier to forget. Weird, sleepy Snowdin could burn to the ground and she could just undo it in an instant.

Undyne rolled her shoulders. As much as she appreciated the sturdy, solid weight of her armor, if she was supposed to capture these humans, giving them the chance to hear her clanking around from a mile away wasn't going to help.

The spikes at her elbows and shoulders retracted; the layers of metal plates around her midsection melded and flattened, the padded shirt underneath dripped away, until she was wearing nothing except the bodysuit which covered everything from the neck down and kept her from leaving dust-colored goo on everything she touched. Her cape slid down and stuck in place, curling and morphing into plain black pants, boots, a short hooded tunic; only the angel pin stayed where it had been, mostly because she always forgot it was there.

The back of Undyne's neck tingled, and she shuddered reflexively.

"What do you want?" she asked aloud. "Gonna tell me I shouldn't do this?"

She slid her hands in her pockets and followed the path to the bridge. At the edge of her blind spot, translucent and insubstantial as a daydream, Sans watched her. Legs folded, elbow resting on his knee.

His presence wasn't a secret, per se, but Undyne tried not to draw any more attention to him than absolutely necessary. Lace and friends seemed to be under the impression that this was just an extension of Undyne's weird magic zombie-visions, and never questioned it much; Alphys, being Alphys, used to always want to talk to Sans or ask what he was doing or saying, until Undyne got stuck playing the go-between, trying to translate on behalf of a monster and a maybe-hallucinatory dead guy. If not for the _severe_ awkwardness that would've ensued if Alphys hadn't been aware of a third party sometimes floating around and watching them, Undyne might not have told her at all.

Sans' cracked skull and white-toothed grin almost perfectly blended into the snowy terrain behind him; the black pits of his eye sockets stared through her.

"Creep."

At the edge of the forest, Undyne stopped walking. Greater Dog's doghouse stood empty.

If the humans were telling the truth about themselves—the jury was out on that one—then they had no idea that they were in a place where dozens of people had died. Kids a little older than themselves, and the entire canine unit. A few had been in the guard longer than she had, but she'd trained alongside them. They played fetch sometimes. She comforted them as best they could when some of their family members Fell Down, thought through what she might say when the news finally broke—she hadn't known, then, what really happened during those experiments. Except for Sans and Alphys herself, nobody did. None of them lived long enough to meet Endogeny.

She tried to hold onto that feeling, that righteous anger, but it fizzled away in the cold air. Whatever stupid decisions might have led them here, and whatever stupid plan they had in their heads, the power imbalance between her and these humans was too lopsided for them to be any threat, which made this feel less like she was heroically hunting down a pair of potential murderers and more like she was playing a twisted game. Hide and seek, humans and monsters. The "human" had to wait and count down from one hundred while the "monsters" found hiding places. But this wasn't a game, games had rules to make them balanced and this wasn't _supposed_ to be fair, just as she'd already told that wannabe tough kid with the gun.

And the longer she screwed around, doing nothing useful, the longer people would sit in their houses, scared, trusting that she would protect them _this_ time, or else fearing she would let them down again.

She kicked a snow poff, watching little clumps of snow fly up and stick to her dark clothes.

When Alphys first became queen, in the very beginning, she had thought about trying to give humans a chance. Any that fell into the Underground would be watched. Treated as a friend if they seemed like they deserved it; treated as an enemy, if not. That stage didn't last long. It couldn't have. Nobody would have stood for it, especially not Undyne.

And so, not very surprisingly, Alphys chose a different policy, one of absolute mistrust; kill any human that fell here, take their SOUL. With Undyne back in the picture, it could only go further, because her very existence tipped the balance so far in the opposite direction of where it had once been.

This was what she was here for. Wasn't it? Kill the humans, take their SOULs, make it quick. Without boss monster SOULs to absorb, the humans couldn't escape the Underground, they could only hurt the people living in it. Undyne refused to even consider reviving the war plan and Alphys didn't think it was viable even if she wanted to take that road, and further Determination experiments were never going to happen, at all, for any reason, and a new power source wasn't even that much of an asset, with the existence of the Core. But they'd never really considered the possibility of two SOULs—hell, Undyne never really thought another human would show up at all. But here they were.

With two SOULs, Undyne could leave the Underground, take five more, and break the barrier, if she really wanted. She could free monsterkind _today_. She'd remember what it felt like to have a SOUL. Regain her compassion, just in time to feel the ironic weight of what it took to get it back.

Because if she did that, if she went and took more SOULs, then humanity—not just Frisk, who for all she could tell might already be dead, but _all_ of humanity—what would be next..?

Undyne growled to herself, then sighed. Massaged her face, felt its slimy surface shift and rearrange itself under the pressure. She covered her eye, tipped her head up, felt the snowflakes tickling her cheek. Wondered how Asgore brought himself to do this.

Began to count down in her head.

_100... 99... 98..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have this irrational fear that Toby Fox is gonna release the rest of Deltarune before I finish this story and my ideas for certain future elements will be wildly off-canon in a way that bothers me, because I'm an obsessive stickler for that kind of thing. I'm also at this odd point where so much time has passed (and, I like to think, so much writerly growth has happened) that I feel iffy about a lot of fairly major aspects of this story that were established literal years ago. But it's too late to make any big changes and I'm determined to finish what I've begun, so I guess I'll just continue lovingly constructing this castle on its foundation of sand and then sit on my throne of angst and weird body horror and even weirder subtext that probably reflects all kinds of things I've been subconsciously working through until the whole construction topples into the sea.
> 
> Or... something like that...
> 
> 11/28/20 UPDATE: Did some revisions.


	4. For The Little Ones

[ human spotted near d & d's sentry stations ]

[ the one with the gun ]

[ then they went back into the forest seems like they're just wandering around????? ]

[ i don't see the other one ]

Undyne waited for the notifications to stop, went to put her phone away, and looked again. Sans read along with her, breathing down her neck despite being a ghost. And a skeleton.

[ think their hand is hurt theyre hoidng it weird ]

[ *holding ]

"Thanks, Alphys," she mumbled. She tried to type out an answer, botched it, and tried to backspace.

[ tgreokgmj ]

 _you misspelled "tgreoekgmi,"_ Sans said, moving to tap her shoulder with his good hand. It phased straight through.

"Very funny."

[ fgrtotr it ]

Undyne lost her patience and switched to the voice-to-text function. After all this time, she still could never keep track of where her fingers were, where all those little joints were supposed to sit, which way they were supposed to bend, and the gloves only sort of helped. Whatever, fine motor skills were for chumps. As long as she could still wield a spear, she didn't care.

"Got it," she said flatly, then set the phone to silent and put it away.

Which, actually, Alphys could see that she'd just done, unless she was still trying to pin down the human's location. And if Alphys was watching, then she was definitely also listening, so Undyne didn't need to have sent a message at all, except that there was no good way to tell when Alphys had her attention turned elsewhere and when she wasn't.

...Somehow, this whole camera deal seemed less creepy when it was the royal scientist watching, not the queen. Maybe those townspeople had a point.

Anyway. One human kid was injured and the other unaccounted-for, which didn't bode well for anyone. Or did they split up on purpose, to make it harder for her to grab them both? It wouldn't help them, in the end, but if she were in their position... she would've rushed straight into a fight. But splitting up was a decent strategy, for kid who weren't as hotheaded as she was. Logical.

"Last chance, Sans," Undyne mumbled.

_for what?_

"That promise of yours."

Sans laughed at her. She hadn't meant it as a joke. Or if she did, not completely. He faded into nothing and left her as alone as she ever was.

She kept moving. Unlike the kids, she didn't have any excuse for stalling.

* * *

* * *

Blondie rubbed their wrist and bit down on their tongue, trying to maintain a stoic exterior even with no one else in sight. Their cheeks were pink from the cold.

They'd given up running long before Clear did, trying to catch their breath, and then kept walking for some time. They followed the winding trail of the other human's footprints as it veered between the trees, but the deeper into the forest they went, the more hard-packed the snow became, frozen close to solid by the permanent cold, until at last, they'd had to stop, seeing that they'd lost sight of any footprints. Trying to turn back only led them further astray. With a bit of luck, they managed to find their way back to the main path. Their patience was surely wearing thin by now.

From the snow popped up a little flower with raggedy yellow petals, brown and wilted at the edges.

Blondie went straight for their gun, wincing as their blistered hand brushed the smooth wood, but they forced themself to raise it and keep it pointed more or less at Flowey. He quivered in fear, but he'd already been doing that.

"Undyne is coming," he hissed, black oval eyes darting to somewhere far behind him.

"Get away from me, freak."

"Just listen. Whatever you did to make her reload, you have to do it again," Flowey pleaded. "If your friend were already dead, we would KNOW, but it'll be easy to kill whoever's left once she has one of your SOULs. You need to act RIGHT NOW."

Blondie's finger moved to the trigger, but Flowey was gone before they could make good on their threat. They switched the safety back on and lowered the BB gun, licking one of the blisters on their finger. They held their breath, but didn't seem to hear anything.

Even so, they quickly set down their gun and let their backpack slide from their shoulders, and searched for their knife.

* * *

Clear was tired and shivering and hopelessly lost by the time they reached the river, their hood pulled up and arms crossed over their chest. Their clothes were sweaty, and any extra warmth they might have accumulated was instantly leached away once they stopped running. The light here was dim to human eyes, as if dusk were setting in, but of course there was no dusk or true night or dawn under the mountain. No warming sunlight.

The human did a double-take, focusing on a particular tree, and the knothole in which a surveillance camera sat hidden. They retraced their path back to the edge of the woods, circling around to avoid the camera's line of sight.

"Myrrh?" they halfheartedly called out, but nobody answered.

Clear dawdled at the edge of the woods for a bit, then seemed to make up their mind and went back to the river, the only distinctive landmark they'd found since becoming separated from their wayward friend. With plodding feet, they trudged along the riverbank, moving parallel to the water whose path they were following.

It was a long walk to Snowdin.

The northern edge of the town looked a little different from what they'd seen before, wooden homes with neat brick chimneys protruding from between the pine trees. No sign with cheerful string lights welcomed them in, and no tinsel, but dark figure bobbed gently behind them, standing at the prow of a little boat.

"Care to join me? I love to ride in my boat."

Clear skittered back, clumsy and half-frozen. It wasn't a very polite reaction, but few things ever fazed the Riverperson, who watched them with a polite friendliness that shouldn't have been possible to convey without a visible face. Clear's breath formed little puffs of steam. The Riverperson's didn't.

The human swallowed, visually measuring the distance from the boat to the shore to themself. It would take quite a jump to reach them from the boat. "U-uh... n-n-no... no thanks."

"Next time, perhaps."

Clear clenched their jaw to control the chattering of their teeth. "Y-yeah. M-maybe." They slid back on one foot, putting extra space between themself and the Riverperson. "H-have you seen... l-like... another kid... l-l-like me, around here?"

"No two people are exactly alike. No one, no one~"

Before Clear could ask any further questions, the Riverperson perked up, dipping their oar into the shallow water and pushing off from the riverbank. "...Soon... soon. Tra la la..."

There was enough time for Clear to mumble an insincere word of thanks before the Riverperson was gone. Snow fell around them, melting gently into the flowing water. Elsewhere in the Underground, some monster needed a ride, or else they would be in need of one by the time the Riverperson reached them. Somehow, the Riverperson always knew.

Cozy-looking houses lined the streets of Snowdin, closed up and locked and in some instances barricaded from the inside with furniture. Clear stopped to examine Ice Wolf's conveyer belt and the stacks of ice blocks surrounding it, then shuffled off toward the main street. They looked around, wanly hopeful, but their friend either hadn't reached the town yet or had moved on to somewhere else, possibly to escape the cold. Their footsteps, if Clear had even thought to look for them, would have been impossible to discern from those of the townspeople.

At the end of the street Clear had just left, a window scraped open and a teenage monster crawled out onto the rooftop. They had yellow scales and clawed wings that seemed too big for the rest of their body, and they were watching the human intently. From a distance, Clearly didn't look distinctly human, but like a bipedal creature in a hooded sweatshirt, a little like a certain monster that once lived in Snowdin.

The winged monster waved for attention, and when they didn't get it, and the small lost figure wandered farther off, the monster bunched themself up and leaped from the roof, sending snow sliding from the eaves.

Clear jolted as a big shadow passed over them, instantly turning to run, but this strategy didn't work so well against a flying creature. The monster teen dropped in front of them, stumbling a little on the landing. Clear skidded to a halt, nearly colliding with the monster and yelping like a scared puppy.

"Aw, crud," said the monster teen. "I musta startled you, hahh... sorry about that, man."

They paused, then leaned in to scrutinize Clear more closely, looking from their face to their striped leggings and bright yellow boots. Seven years ago, the monster teen almost died at the hands of a certain human, but the creature standing in front of them was smaller than the human they had seen, and their eyes were bright with life, and they were quivering like a leaf.

"Actually, for a second there, I thought YOU mighta been one of those humans, even though you're by yourself, haha."

Clear stared back with a reasonable degree of trepidation for a human child suddenly accosted by a gangly wyvern in a poncho. "P-p-please don't eat me."

"Dude, whaaa _aaaaat?_ " The monster teen waited for them to laugh, or at least smile, or give some other indication that they were making a joke. When no signal came, and the seconds ticked by, they became uneasy. Seven years ago, the monster teen _hadn't_ died, but Undyne wasn't here for them to hide behind, and every passing moment (so far as they knew) increased the probability that a human might appear. "...Come on, stop messing around. You gotta go home, dude. Where's your parents? Didn't you hear the alarm before? Something really bad could happen if you stay out here."

The monster teen stepped forward and Clear tried to retreat, then slipped on a patch of ice and dropped painfully onto their bottom. They scooted themself back with their feet and whimpered.

As the puzzled monster teen tried to coax Clear back up, the front door of their house banged open, the Snowdin librarian shouting the monster teen's name in what was very much not their indoor voice. Clear cowered with their head pressed between their knees, maybe hoping that this might end the way their first encounter with Undyne did, that if they ignored their surroundings for long enough, everything would go away and the problem would resolve itself somehow.

The strategy didn't quite work.

"What do you think you're _doing_?!" demanded the librarian, hurrying across the street. The human sitting in the snow gave them pause, but little concern. In this world, the human that nearly murdered their child never bothered to visit the library. "And who is this?"

"I don't know! They were walking around out here like they're lost, or something, and they're being really weird..."

"Fine. Never mind. Come on, back inside, both of you."

The monster teen nodded meekly, but Clear stayed as they were, quietly rocking in place. The librarian nudged them, asked if they were hurt, received no answer, and swiftly lost their patience, scooping Clear up in their arms. Between the librarian's distraction and worry and unimpressive stats, a single strong attack would be devastating, but Clear just screamed and screamed and didn't stop as the librarian carried them back into the house, trying fruitlessly to shush them.

Once inside, the screaming stopped, and Clear began to squirm, but the librarian couldn't set them down, Clear refused to move their feet and would've collapsed back into a hunched-over ball on the floor if the librarian let go. The monster teen grimaced and shrugged, and their parent, equally confused by this odd little being, staggered inside with them and deposited them on the couch. The curtains were all drawn, the lights dim by the front windows and brighter around the house's central room.

"Haven't you _learned_ by now?" the librarian snapped, then instantly regretted it. They went to the closet to grab a blanket. "...You should have told me, first."

"S-sorry."

A third monster poked her head into the room, a scruffy bird with purple-tinted feathers. "Holy crap, it sounded like somebody being _murdered_ outside."

The monster teen fidgeted. "Nah. This little kid was, like, lost, I think... they asked if I was gonna like _eat_ them, haha."

"The poor thing is freezing," murmured the librarian, draping a heavy throw blanket around Clear's shoulders. The human flinched as if they'd been struck, but the blanket was soft and warm and they instinctively burrowed down, maybe hoping that these monsters operated on the same logic of imaginary monsters that lurked under beds—underneath the blanket was safe. It made about as much sense as the screaming. Maybe their friend had a point about their inability to cope with stress.

The librarian knelt to what would have been Clear's eye-level, if their face wasn't covered. "Are you hurt? Why were you... did you see something that scared you?"

"They didn't like getting picked up," said the monster teen.

"I noticed."

The bird girl performed the feathery equivalent of a raised eyebrow. "Okay. I'm pretty sure they have, like, problems."

"Don't be rude," the librarian scolded. It didn't work as well on the girl as it did with her sibling. "Did they tell you anything about where they came from?"

"Nope."

They weren't shivering so hard now, but Clear didn't seem any more inclined to speak than before. The librarian sighed and stood up, polishing their glasses on their sleeve. "I suppose it doesn't matter, until we can go out. In the meantime... I'll make some tea. Our guest may need it. Keep an eye on them, please."

The bird girl waited for her parent to leave, then retired to her bedroom. The monster teen plopped down on the floor in front of Clear, being perceptive enough to sense that getting too close might upset them again, but not perceptive to decide that a little extra space might be helpful.

Some time passed. Slowly, like a turtle in its shell, Clear peeked out. The monster teen was staring at them, which was nearly enough to send them back into hiding, but they must have felt relatively safe under the blanket, because now they dared to sneak halfway-glances at their surrounds, never letting the monster teen fully out of their sight.

The house wasn't so different from what a human would recognize as normal, or even very different from the house in the RUINS, aside from being much smaller. There was a crocheted owl with wooden beads for eyes hanging on the wall. The corners of the furniture were covered in rounded foam padding, and from the clumsy way the monster teen carried themself, Clear might have been able to deduce the reason for it, if they tried. They probably weren't, but the monster kid sat up straighter, brightening.

"Hey, kid, uh... you're not dumb for feeling scared, dude. I guess you were too little to remember, uh, last time, right? That's gotta be scary," the monster teen said, a little awkwardly. "I still feel that way too, sometimes, hah... but it's okay. Undyne's protecting us." They stopped themself, frowning. They tried to scratch their face, but their wings were too long to maneuver properly. "...You DO, uh... like her, right? Probably? 'Cause around here, some people, um... there's stuff they don't really GET, they think some stuff that's not true, so, if you've talked to them..."

A small, confused noise emanated from under the blanket, and Clear quietly started to ask something, before the monster teen spoke over them.

"Where are ya from, anyway? The city, maybe?"

Clear blinked, eyebrows knitting, and gave a small nod.

"Yup, that makes sense. Lotsa weird-looking monsters live around there, and I KNOW you're not from Waterfall 'cause you don't even have gills or scales or anything, and..." The monster teen realized what they'd said, and tried and failed to cover it up. "Didja follow Undyne here or something? 'Cause. Uh. I've... heard of kids doing stuff like that, hahaha... ha."

If Clear had any good sense, they would already be doing some serious thinking at this moment. Because they had met Undyne, and as intimidating as she was, she wasn't the mindless beast Flowey had described, or even a particularly vicious person. Only angry. Because they and their friend were humans, and they were in the Underground with weapons; the gun was only a toy, and the humans had no way to know that a toy weapon was just as dangerous to a monster as the real thing, but, conversely, there was no reasonable way Undyne could have known that it _wasn't_ the real thing. It looked real. Anger was a rational response to the threat of violence. And Clear themself had suggested that monsters could be good, and they'd only done so because they were trying to convince Undyne that they were harmless, which failed miserably—but they _had_ suggested it. The idea wasn't unthinkable.

Clear gripped tighter to the blanket at the sound of a high whistle, but it was just a teakettle, quickly taken off the stove, maintaining the quiet in the house. Clear stared at the owl decoration on the wall, and the owl stared back.

* * *

* * *

The human—the older one, little gun-toting Goldilocks—was fumbling with some small item when Undyne found them, using one hand to hold it and the heel of the other hand to try and... Undyne couldn't even tell, but they weren't succeeding. The snow crunched beneath her boots and the human froze where they knelt, gawking. Undyne said nothing, because there was no point in saying anything to someone she was about to kill.

Instead of panicking, or attacking, or even slipping into the stunned blankness she had seen in them after they stabbed their friend, the human stared at her until the momentary fear faded, and then they wrinkled their nose in disgust. Not even the moral kind. They looked at her like they'd just stepped in something gross.

"Why do you look like that. Why does your face look like that. Who and _what_ are you."

"Why does my face look like _WHAT?!_ " she snapped, mostly out of principle because she already knew what they were thinking; Alphys had one opinion about Undyne's appearance, and literally everyone else who'd seen Undyne since her rebirth had a different opinion. There was a reason why she spent so much time in full armor now, helmet and all, and it wasn't just because she'd returned to her old job as the captain of the royal guard...

An awkward grin crawled across Undyne's face. Her armor. She wasn't wearing it now. Even her voice would be distorted behind the helmet.

Or maybe not so distorted. The blond human gasped, and there was no time to take any perverse joy in their reaction even if she'd wanted to, because they were frantically trying to unfold the little pocket knife, _that_ was what they were holding, and for a second she was somewhere far away. In another second, she'd launched herself at the kid, pinning them to the snowy ground with her knee against their stomach. Not hard enough to seriously hurt them, only to keep them from moving, and next she grabbed their wrist and squeezed tight, forcing them to drop the knife, which she snatched up and flung away—she heard the thud of it sticking into a tree somewhere. The human kid struggled and snapped at her like a little animal.

There was a flash of bright red on their palm, on the hand that hadn't been holding the knife. Undyne grabbed it and forced it up, expecting to see blood, but the human kid just hissed as her gloved fingers scraped over blistered skin. Burns.

"What the hell did you do to yourself? And where's your friend?"

Still pinned, the human tried to lunge up and sink their teeth into her arm, which (as she and one of her new-ish students learned a _looong_ time ago) was never going to work. She released their hand, which they hugged protectively to their chest. They wheezed. Without thinking much, she let up the pressure on them and began to move back; they went for their gun and she snatched it away, throwing it after the knife, she didn't even see where it went. The kid squirmed harder, trying to twist around and somehow reach the gun anyway.

Undyne flicked her hand back to summon a spear, the splintered point hovering close to the human's throat, which shut them up pretty quick. There was no reason to drag this out any more than she needed to. No point in trying to be honorable, when this wasn't even a fight. She should just kill them now. Take their SOUL and get this over with. Just do it.

Just kill them.

It wasn't even a fight...

The kid's blond hair was a tangled mess in the snow. They looked absolutely nothing like Frisk in any aspect except maybe age, but in front of her she saw Frisk's mangled little corpse on the ground after they tried to run from her without fighting, before she even knew them as "Frisk"... and she saw _this_ kid, too, eyes blank and face slack after killing their little friend...

Undyne narrowed her eye, checking the kid's expression. She wasn't even sure what she was looking _for_ , not having Sans' weird talent for reading faces, but they were still at LV 1. No EXP. They hadn't killed Flowey, at the very least. As for the other kid, she had no idea. Didn't seem like they were armed, after all.

If she had found that other kid instead, the one who'd spouted all that _ooh but maybe you're a NICE monster!_ crap, it would've been easier to just do what she needed to do, drawing from her memories of how Frisk had fooled everyone with their cutesy sweetheart routine. After encountering the two kids in Waterfall, she was prepared for that. But _this_ kid had hated her guts pretty much on sight, which would've been funny, except that so far they'd done nothing to convince her that they _wouldn't_ attack another monster with just as little hesitation.

But even if they were a horrible person, from their perspective, she was an evil knight in black armor trying to rip their SOUL out of their chest. Their friend tried to use the age defense, and it was a terrible defense to use against a monster, but how old _were_ they, even? Ten? Twelve? She'd met plenty of kids that age on the surface. They were—and this was not, outside the context of murder and SOUL theft and Frisk's crimes, a totally negative thing—morons. Frisk... Frisk had been different. Not just an idiot kid, or a violent kid. Just evil. Filled with mindless, senseless hatred against people they knew and people they pretended to love and people who didn't even do anything to them.

This was a kid, who was dumb and violent and had terrible judgment, but there was literally nothing they could do to anyone right now, and they had a friend they cared about, and from their perspective, she was an evil knight in black armor trying to rip their SOUL out of their chest. Their friend tried to use the age defense, and it was a terrible defense to use against a monster, but how were they even supposed to _know_? How old were they, even? Ten? Twelve? She'd taught plenty of kids that age on the surface. They were—and this was not, outside the context of murder and SOUL theft and Frisk's crimes, always a bad thing—total dumbasses. Not homicidal dumbasses, but... what the hell.

What was she doing?

Undyne lowered the spear and let it fizzle back out of existence. Her hands didn't shake, she was too tough for that, but she was gritting her fangs. "Screw it," she muttered, to herself or to the human, hell if she even knew. "If Alphys wants to... I'm not doing this. Change of plans."

She let go of the pinned human. They pushed themself up to a sitting position with their uninjured hand and scooted away from her, but before they could try and make a run for it, she wrapped their SOUL in green magic. They squirmed and clawed at the snow, pinned in place even more firmly than before.

" _Wh-why can't I move_."

"I'm not letting you go," Undyne said. "Even if I trusted you, which I don't, that wouldn't be an option."

"Let me go."

"I just told you I'm not doing that. I dunno what I'm going to do with you. But it's not... I don't WANT to kill you."

 _"Let me go!_ " the human snarled.

Undyne sighed, sort of. It was closer to a groan. She rubbed her hand to her forehead, and her hair stuck to her skin when she took it away. It felt as gross as it must have looked. She shouldn't be doing this, she should just kill them, she had no other choice. Didn't she? She'd never thought a lot about the possibilities. She never really thought any more humans would be stupid enough to come here at all, at least not for a long, long time.

...Alphys was probably watching this, right now. This was gonna suck.

The snow was raked with little finger marks where the human had clawed at it before finally tiring themself out. Now they just knelt in the snow, a hand pressed to their chest over the green glow of her magic around their SOUL. Undyne tensed, halfway expecting them to attempt something _really_ stupid, but their hand dropped.

She folded her arms. "You done now?"

The human glared up at her.

"I don't want to kill you. But I'm also not letting you hurt anyone," she said, as close to patiently as she could get. "You and your friend will both be better off if you tell me where they are, and if _they_ have any weapons I haven't seen yet. I don't want to kill them, either, but I'll do it if I have to."

"I don't know where they are, and if I did, I would NEVER tell you," the human spat.

 _flowey must not've gotten to them_ , whispered a voice in her head. Undyne hadn't even thought Sans was watching. She suppressed a random shiver down the back of her neck.

"That's fair, I guess. If I were you, I wouldn't give my friend away, either," she said, even as the kid kept on staring at her like she was an evil freak, or maybe just a regular kind of freak, which was, well. It wasn't like she cared. "I had friends, before Frisk killed them. I bet Flowey didn't mention THAT, whatever else he told you."

"I _hate_ people that pretend to be friendly and really aren't. You... made me do something horrible. If you _truly_ want to be nice, then start by letting me go. _Right now_." The kid's voice quavered, even though they were trying their hardest to act tough. Frisk never did anything like that.

Under her stare, the human pulled their knees up and curled around the wrist still clutched to their chest. Undyne could've offered to heal it. Somehow, she didn't think they'd go for it.

"Wh...what are you planning to do now. If you really aren't going to kill me."

"I... don't even know."

And that answered nothing at all, but how were they going to argue?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been a bit creatively burned these days, and I feel like I "shouldn't" have uploaded this, but I also have a bit of an arbitrary deadline I want to hit with something. Might go back and rework this later. Maybe.


	5. Love

With the blond human Myrrh subdued by her green magic and safely in her line of sight, Undyne had walked off a little ways to make a phone call. The human strained their ears to listen, unable to lean forward with their SOUL pinned in place, but her voice was too low. They faced an uncertain fate, whatever Undyne might have said about not _wanting_ to kill them, and they surely knew it.

She should have killed them.

Elsewhere in the Underground, a small monster huddled next to Reaper Bird, trying to distract themself with a book while they worried over a younger sibling who'd rashly joined the royal guard. That same sibling was trying to put on a brave face in front of a partner even younger than they were. (In a few moments, their phone was going to ring.) Gerson was brewing sea tea in his shop, humming an ancient song under his breath; Lemon Bread was lying at the bottom of her pond and twitching in discomfort—the parts of her that were Moldsmal and Aaron's brother never _never_ got along—as she thought about the human intruders, and her little sister, whose life she might have saved if only Alphys had let all the Amalgamates go free a little sooner. The Riverperson was rowing their way to their next destination, uncharacteristically quiet.

There is no "here" or "there" for me, no singular place where I am. My bones lay in the soil where Toriel buried me, my bones and my teeth and a few moldering fragments of hair eaten up by the roots of the golden flowers. I slept there for a long time.

Now I am almost nothing. The human Determination that awakened me has ebbed low; my presence in the Underground has been sustained by little more than a lonely flower's dreams.

I monitor the progress of two hapless humans in the Underground, and I follow my partner, miraculously bilocated, and I whisper to myself, only myself. I could tell my partner what I've seen, murmuring in their ear the exact number of monsters that survived the massacre or were born into this world after that day, plus one monster who didn't survive, despite her and my efforts. I could tell them what Alphys is doing now. I could tell them about the slight, bright sparks of Determination that are the two human children.

But why? My partner is the one in control, and this is the path they have chosen for us. Let them live with the consequences of their foolish actions.

* * *

You are wiping down the counters with a damp cloth when a middle-aged woman bursts in, frazzled and damp-haired, leading a toddler by the hand. "You guys are still open, right?" she asks.

She's addressing you, but your coworker answers instead. "Sorry, we already started taking apart the coffee machine."

The woman's face falls. You tell her that you can take her order, if she doesn't mind waiting a few extra minutes.

"You sure?" your coworker whispers. "Your shift ends the same time as mine, doesn't it..?"

You say that it's fine, you don't mind doing this, and she shrugs and mouths a _thanks!_ before going in back to clock out, apron strings already untied.

The woman thanks you effusively and orders her vanilla latte, then launches into a rambling monologue about her infant son at home and her wife's job and their daily schedule, as if you care enough to demand some excuse for her to be allowed to have caffeine and sugar at this hour. You half-listen and hum at the appropriate points, until she eventually asks if you're a native to the area, and if you're attending the local college. You say no to the first question and yes to the second, and then, because you know what she'll ask next, you tell her that you're going for a double major, accounting and Japanese.

The woman raises her eyebrows in a kind of feigned, impressed surprise that you find vaguely distasteful. "Ooooh, sounds like a lot of work. Bet you study hard. Are you going to move to Japan once you graduate? All those, you know, all those, like, tech companies... sweetie, take your fingers out of your mouth."

It is, you agree. But no, you aren't going to move.

The toddler's fingers stay firmly planted in their mouth.

"Oh. Really? Then what _do_ you have in mind?" the woman asks. "A smart cookie like you isn't going to stick around in a job like this forever. I can tell you're not. You're a person with a plan." She gives you a conspiratorial wink.

You shrug.

What you don't say is that you turn in most of your assigned work but your grades are horrible, mainly because you skip class more often than not, and when you do attend, you never speak. You've met with your academic advisor just once, because they cornered you, and they gently suggested that your courseload was too much to take on all at once, and they asked what you want out of your education and where you want to be in five years, and you stared out the window at the roof of the engineering building until they let you leave. You can barely conceive the existence of a "tomorrow" or "next week", and you feel like you're wasting everyone's time and resources by sitting in those classrooms. Japanese appealed to you, but you don't remember why you chose accounting. You don't remember why you chose that school, or Aruceria City in particular. At the beginning of last summer, you got a call from, you forget—your old caseworker, it would've been—informing you of the existence of a special tuition program set up for _young people in your situation_ , whatever that means, and you had done nothing in the months since you turned eighteen (again) except get quietly drunk, so you suppose that explains some part of your reasoning. You remember getting on a bus with no destination in mind, but you don't actually know what you're doing _here_. You don't think any of this would really answer the woman's question.

The toddler points to a muffin behind the glass, and by rote you inform the woman that baked goods are marked down after 8 pm, which was more than an hour ago. You hand her the drink, and she pays for the muffin, too, which you dutifully retrieve with a pair of tongs and drop into a paper bag. Apple-cinnamon. She thanks you again and digs through her purse for some change to put in the tip jar while her child drops sugary crumbs all over the floor, which you'll have to sweep up before you can leave. She calls you a doll, and you mumble something meaningless but vaguely friendly-sounding, making no eye contact.

You close up shop, clock out, and unchain your bike from out front, a scarf wrapped over your nose and mouth. It's been drizzling on and off since this morning, and the pavement is covered in puddles of rainwater that sparkle under the street lamps and splash up as the front wheel cuts through them, shattering into glittery fragments of light. Stray raindrops dot your shoulders. The wet spots smell faintly stale, like gasoline.

You've heard that the local government is doing its best to deal with the legacy this region—this whole world, really—has inherited, but they have no miracle devices or magic to save them from the poison in the air. It isn't as bad as it used to be, people say, but you find yourself coughing more often since you moved here, and you sometimes dread the ride to and from work.

This job is good, though. You have a script to follow, taking orders and dispensing drinks and gradually disappearing into the background hum of other people's lives. The customers are usually okay, and when they aren't, your coworkers take pleasure in commiserating, comparing notes on all the jerks and the weirdos while you nod and hum and pretend to be part of the conversation. The managers seem to think they know the kind of person that you are, and they treat you with more leniency than you deserve.

(Less than a week after you were hired, a different woman came into the coffee shop, much older than the one from tonight, with white hair and a long purple dress and three grandchildren clinging to her skirt. You have no idea what she tried to order because the next thing you knew, you were kneeling over a toilet in the staff bathroom with the guy who's been showing you how to use the register resting a hand on your back and asking if there was somebody he should call to pick you up. You already felt better, but they made you go home anyway, and you went straight to bed and slept through your shift the next day. For some reason they still wanted you back. Maybe they were just short-staffed and desperate.)

Also, sometimes you get to bring home donuts, if there are any left over at the end of the day.

* * *

Your roommate is showering when you let yourself into the apartment.

You go to your bedroom and change out of your work uniform, walking straight past the golden locket sitting on your dresser. It isn't mine. You turned nineteen two months ago, and this was a gift from your roommate, chosen because he saw how you'd gravitated toward the jewelry section of the thrift store where the two of you were ostensibly looking for cheap furniture. It's real gold, studded with dainty crystals that outline the embossed shape of a heart. You've never worn the thing, and you hate that you have to see it every day, but you can't bring yourself to touch it, either, so there it sits.

You don't even know how he figured out your birth date. You've never mentioned it.

When you started looking for a roommate, you specifically sought out an international student, reasoning that they would never have heard about you and wouldn't possibly recognize you, especially after you had your name legally changed. Somehow you hadn't accounted for the possibility that internet search engines might exist in other countries, or that your roommate might want to make sure he wasn't about to move in with an axe murderer. He's a terrible judge of character, but shrewd in other ways, and before you'd even met in person, he already knew who you were and, broadly, what happened to you, as much as was reported in the local media at the time. You've mentioned the foster homes, because he asked why you weren't going to visit your family over the holidays, and he knows about the locket, somewhat, which is to say that he knows you used to own a locket, and it was important to you. You wish he didn't.

You place your Japanese textbook on the counter and open the fridge. Chicken breasts, bell peppers, onions; a heavy pan and a cutting board and a set of measuring spoons from the cabinet. Honey and salt. You're tired from being on your feet all day, and you're tired of being in a kitchen environment, even if this food is for you alone. But you're hungry.

The shower shuts off, and you've started chopping the peppers when your roommate emerges, releasing a cloud of humid air into the rest of the apartment. It smells nice. This morning, before you left for class and then work, he mentioned he had a date planned for tonight. ~~~~

(Yes, he has a girlfriend, your heart-themed birthday gift notwithstanding. They've been going out for less than three months, but they're both kind and beautiful people who look even more beautiful together, and naturally they're infatuated with each other. There is no possibility that you could successfully seduce your roommate. Not that you've ever considered trying. Really, you haven't.)

The hairs on your neck prickle as you sense him moving behind you. "Hey, you're home now," he says, a little too matter-of-factly. "How are you feeling today?"

You tell him you're fine. His phrasing implies that he thought you might answer differently, though, and you aren't sure why.

"Have you... seen the news?"

You pop the stem out the top of the bell pepper, clear greenish juice and seeds sticking to your hands. You say no. Because you haven't. You don't follow the news, you don't care about politics. You go to your classes and you go to work and you go home. The rest of the world has nothing to do with you.

(When you were sixteen, you were granted access to the trust that had been established on your behalf by some charity group, you sad little orphan. On a whim, you bought stocks in every fledgling company you could remember making it big in your first adulthood, and then you immediately lost everything because you failed to consider how the reemergence of a supposedly mythical, extinct species of sapient creatures would have influenced the direction of the global economy, had it happened. We both laughed.)

"Wait... let me show you."

The chicken sizzles in the pan. As you rinse and dry your hands, your roommate waves his phone into your peripheral vision. You glance over by reflex alone, paying no real attention, then snatch it away and scroll so fast that you have to scan through the page three times to absorb any of the words.

Yesterday, two children walked out of their Ebott middle school and never made it home. They were reported missing later that evening, the last confirmed sighting being from a bus driver and a few passengers; the children had asked about reaching an oddly specific destination at the edge of the city, not an area they would have any logical reason to visit. Midway through the ride, a passenger noticed that one of the children was carrying a toy gun, which was against a number of rules, but once they alerted the driver and the driver stopped the bus, the children jumped off and ran, and were never seen again.

At the bottom of the page are two small, grainy photos, evidently taken from a class picture. A pale, serious-faced preteen and a curly-haired cherub.

You hand the cell phone back to your roommate, whose expression wouldn't be more pained if he'd just shoved his hand into the sizzling pan on the stove. He searches for the right words. "I shouldn't have mentioned this. I'm sorry. I thought that you had already seen the news today. I didn't mean for it to be, um, triggering..."

You turn your attention back to your cooking, scraping the chopped peppers into the pan with attentive focus that requires you not to look at your roommate. His earnestness makes you want to laugh, even though it feels like you've just been punched in the stomach. You tell him that you appreciate his concern for your wellbeing, but that those kids don't mean anything to you. You don't know them, you've never met them. You haven't even lived in Ebott for years.

He starts to answer, but he seems worried that he's already pushed you too far. You've been told that you have an excellent poker face, so you're not sure what he saw in you to provoke such a reaction. Maybe he's just a caring person. What an alien concept. "Are you... sure? If you want—I can stay home, if it would..."

Before he's even finished, you're shaking your head. You don't need to be babysat. He already has plans, and so do you; you're going to eat and then study for the rest of the evening and then go to bed, like always. Punctuating this, you pick up the knife and start on another pepper, slicing it cleanly in half.

Your roommate must find your insistence suspicious, but he relents. "Okay. But, if you... if something is wrong, you can tell me. If you want. If it helps." He truly has a kind and gentle SOUL, for a human. "I'm... always here."

You look back at him. His shirt is tight-fitting in the most flattering possible way, sleeves rolled halfway up and crisp white against his dark skin, and he has possibly the most symmetrical face you've ever seen on a real human being. Before he can defend himself, you raise the knife and drive it into the vulnerable hollow between his collarbone and throat.

...No, you don't do that.

The kitchen knife clatters against the cutting board as you slam it down and curl your hands around the edge of the countertop, and you squeeze your eyes shut and don't move until your roommate gets the hint that you don't want to talk anymore. The front door opens and shuts. You hear him walk away.

Your shoulders drop. You finish preparing your meal. You sit down and open your textbook and then scramble for your battered old laptop, searching feverishly for everything you can find about the two lost children. A few other articles (all local to Ebott, all repeating the same few details with little variation, so useless), a video clip of a news broadcast and the comments section underneath, a church choir's online photo album, a family member's social media page.

The basic outline of their lives takes shape. One was a local, having been born and brought up in a rural area within the region of Ebott. They were said to be shy, uninterested in the company of other children and preferring to spend their time outdoors, and while none of the sources specified this, you surmise that this was the child with the toy gun, a small weapon perhaps intended for hunting squirrels or birds. The other human was from a southeastern portion of the country; they were born prematurely and spent their early childhood in frail health, so their parents sent them far away to live with an aunt and attend school in Ebott, having heard about its uncommonly clean air and natural beauty. One was eleven and the other had just turned twelve, and though they didn't seem to have much in common in terms of personality or interests, they were the best of friends, having formed an instant bond in the way of children at that age. Neither had any history of self-harm, nor any social media accounts through which they might have been lured by a predator, and any problems they had at home were within the scope of ordinary preteen life. The video clip and the aunt's social media page give the impression of sincerely distraught families. Tearful parents pleading for the safe return of their children, a typo-ridden online post expressing the same sentiment. Of course, abusive guardians generally don't announce that they beat or starve their wards immediately after reporting them missing, and certain things can go unnoticed even by adults who try to be attentive... so you know very little, really, and the information you do have is slightly suspect.

The news articles all use the same two or three photos. The school pictures. A snapshot from a birthday party. You look at them and then close the laptop, your food slowly going cold.

You've read about abduction cases and disappearances, and you know that the probability of a safe return sharply decreases after the first 24 hours. All else being equal, statistics dictate that the children were dead by the time anyone thought to look for them, probably hacked into pieces and buried in someone's backyard. But this was a disappearance from Ebott. And that doesn't necessarily improve the pair's odds of being alive, but as for _where_ they are, you know where the human authorities will not look, the looming mountain they will moronically pretend not to see, no matter how desperate they say they are. In a way, the children are lucky that there is _any_ effort being made to find them. No one even noticed you were gone.

You lean your elbows on the countertop, trying to think.

It's been years since you lost access to your file—oh, what an enjoyable discovery _t_ _hat_ was—and your ability to sense time in the Underground rewriting itself has steadily weakened ever since, but you assume that the power to SAVE defaulted back to Flowey. He has every reason to want those human SOULs, the primary one being that their combined power would be sufficient to cross the barrier. You think you would know by now if he'd done this, so he may not have killed the children yet, or else he has the SOULs and he's using them for some other mischief before he heads for the surface. An alternate possibility is that one of the humans managed to overwrite Flowey's file, but you can't know for certain, and if this is the case, then they're still trapped, doomed to wander a barren and potentially hostile Underground until their Determination fails them. It seems most sensible to assume that the children are dead, and work from there.

So, then, who is left?

Alphys? You didn't kill her, though that doesn't rule out an early end. With her guilt assuaged and her friends supporting her and humanity eager to accept her scientific knowledge, she thrived on the surface world and blossomed into a confident leader, but she was so fragile when you first met her, and in this world, you ripped away all her support and then crushed her underfoot. Whether she chose to follow her friends into oblivion or not, you don't think she will be particularly relevant.

But there's Sans. Sans, Sans, Sans, he was always... _reliable_ is the wrong word. But the two of you once shared a special bond—he trusted you, he loved you—and you feel an odd sort of faith in him, even after what you've done. You also know there was animosity between him and Flowey. Would that be enough to deter Flowey from rash behavior? Probably not. But if those children are still alive, then you strongly suspect it will be because _Sans_ is still alive. His trust in you is gone, of course. He doesn't know who you are anymore. But you still know those stupid code phrases, and you know he made a promise, one that he never kept but also never fully broke. And if the children are dead, you also know it is possible for a human to cross the barrier and leave the Underground with human SOULs that are not their own.

You push yourself away from the table and go to get your wallet. If you had enough cash to cover your half of next month's rent, you would leave it behind for your roommate. You dump out everything you do have, count through it, and hold onto only as much as you think you'll need. The kitchen knife sits where you left it on the cutting board. It will need to be washed before you leave, and the uneaten food put away.

Having left the money on the kitchen counter where your roommate will see it, you write him a carefully-worded note and place it on top of the flattened bills. In theory you should also email your Intro to Marketing professor to say you will be missing class tomorrow, but at this point, speaking to her for any reason would raise more concern than just not showing up. You do take the time to call the coffee shop and leave a short message, explaining that you won't be in for your shift tomorrow.

You end the call and walk to the bathroom and shut the door and raise the toilet seat to retch, but you haven't eaten since this morning and nothing happens. You feel yourself sweating.

I cannot understand why. If you felt remorse for your actions, then you had months to go back and choose a different path. Even after that became impossible, you could have gone back to the mountain to offer up your own SOUL in recompense for those you had taken. You have had seven years to do this, and you did not. Why do you feel distress only now? Are you afraid? Why?

You ignore my words and leave the bathroom, methodically gathering the things you will need. A powerful emotion seethes within your human SOUL; now that you have grown, for a second time, into an adult, it feels alien, but the possibility of it was always there, lying dormant inside you.

You do not deserve to have "it" back. But, then, you and I never did share the same ideas about fairness. I once thought that we did, when you were still a child like me, but that was so long ago, was it not?

My partner.

My dear and precious partner. My SOUL-mate.

May you burn in hell.


End file.
